Visual Studio 2010 beta2 + Framework 4.0
. . . with a few comments on Windows Virtual PC.
Installation
I don’t “work” on my laptop – mostly used for travel, library, watching Hulu and channel 9, etc. Since I will be out of town for a while, however, I decided to install VS20101b2 in a winVPC for the trip on the laptop. The only complaint about the new VPC offering from Microsoft is that when it is running, it takes forever for my notebook to initiate sleep mode. I don’t recall the old product having this issue.
Installation of 2010 was a breeze, especially Team Foundation Server (holy crap is that a different experience!). The new icon needs work – looks very bad in the new Windows 7 taskbar with the default theme.
First Impressions
The first thing I did was fire up the VM and connect to TFS server – all running on the laptop – in a 1GB VM, I might add. I create a new team project (‘TestProject’). This all worked. I seem to remember several days before I was able to accomplish this on tfs2005, and at least a few hours on tfs2008. Today’s elapsed time is a couple of minutes (for the TFS part).
Overall, I found a snappy IDE that has a finished feel to it. Nice. March release should be no problem.
Branching and Merging
I setup the TestProject with a typical branching and merging strategy (dev/main/prod), added a few work items and a bug, and got to work.
[ Note: I like the little ‘Save’ icon – saves a picture of the visualization] There seem to be lots of tools accessible from this UI, such as branch compare tools. Overall, this visualizer is a nice feature (the simple picture shown does not do justice). I’m still looking for the merge visualizations (update: found them!). I’d like to see merge arrows that are labeled per the changeset description and clickable to show history/changeset details for merges. It looks like I’ve got some exploring to do.
Team Web Access
I was not expecting this. Even in the Basic product running on a local client OS. Nice touch. It’s a beautiful source, work item, project browser web application. Who needs SharePoint?
New in Framework
I’ve already blogged a few times about changes in the Framework 4.0 beta. A few more in this release:
- DLR library
- Several more threading primitives
- System.Collections.Concurrent namespace
- MEF improvements
- In-process side-x-side CLR