Overlooked Features of Visual Studio 11

by Dmitry Kirsanov 16. April 2012 05:39

Visual Studio LogoScott Hanselman is a senior program manager in the developer division (whatever that means) at Microsoft. In other words, he is one of the primary sources of information regarding Microsoft Visual Studio.

He has quite interesting post about features of Visual Studio 11 which presumably were not noticed by the community. Until his post, anyway.

What I find especially interesting is that Visual Studio 11 Express edition is going to provide unit testing feature – something that wasn’t available in free Visual Studio editions before. This correlates to Visual Studio 11 Team Foundation Server, which got it’s free edition as well, making Visual Studio much harder to beat even if the budget is tight. I suppose this could lead to improved quality of other development environments.

Other features of Visual Studio were quite expected. If you are using ReSharper software or other tweaks and add-ins for Visual Studio, you may notice that historically Visual Studio has tendency of “importing” features of the most successful 3rd party tools into the base package. Although bad for ReSharper at first glance, this won’t let guys at JetBrains to relax, boosting their creativity.

One of such features is the picture preview in the list of images in your Solution Explorer, the CSS color picker and JavaScript library reference as part of the IntelliSense.

Additional important thing, especially related to the featured Captcha project, is that default web server for Visual Studio 11 is IIS Express, so there won’t be that frustrating “works here but not on server” problem anymore.

blog comments powered by Disqus