|
While some of you have been playing with Visual Studio 2005 for a while now, many of you probably either haven't found the time or are a little worried about messing up your current development environment. This article will give you a quick look at Microsoft's latest development environment and highlight some of the new features you can expect when you do get around to installing it.
Installation
As anyone who's installed a recent version of Visual Studio can tell you, it's not for the faint of heart.
Check out the screen cap below. See that list of components down the left hand side... and this is just
the Standard Version that I'm installing for this article.
For more infomation about what each version of Visual Studio 2005 includes, check out the
Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview
Luckily the majority of the setup process requires very little input from the user. After you tell it
what you want to install you can pretty much just let it do it's thing. The only reason you can't
start it and leave is that fact that you need to be there to swap the CDs. If you've got some extra
space available, you might try copying the discs to a single folder before installation, but I didn't
get the chance to try that.
You'd think that since we're gonna sit and watch the setup process in order to swap cds that Microsoft
would've given us more then 3 different info screens to rotate through. I won't spoil the surprise by
showing you all of them, but you can see one of them below.
When setup is complete we get a little congratulations screen that tells us to go check for updates and
be sure everything is patched.
Different Versions
All projects you build with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 target version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.
It does not allow you to build projects that target previous versions of the .NET Framework.
While Visual Studio 2005 will upgrade projects from previous versions, if you choose to do so, you'll
no longer be able to open it with the earlier version.
In order to deal with this, Microsoft supports side-by-side installation of Visual Studio 6.0,
Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003, and Visual Studio 2005 all on the same machine. This allows you to
keep your current environment installed in order to maintain existing applications and at the same time
gradually start to use the new environment for new projects. While I've never actually had them all installed,
I do currently have versions 6.0, 2003, and 2005 all installed... so it does work.
For more information about installing multiple versions of Visual Studio, see:
Installing Visual Studio Versions Side-by-Side from the Visual Studio documentation.
One of the things that was the most annoying for me in Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 was that
everything was project based. For most things this is great, but for maintaining older projects
(classic ASP and plain old HTML-based sites) it really could be a pain. There was no easy way
to just connect to a website via FrontPage Server Extensions and pop open a file to edit. You'd have
to first create a project and then add files to it manually. It was such a pain that until now I've
still been using Microsoft Visual InterDev 6 to manage the older sites that I still have to maintain.
Thankfully this is no longer an issue with Visual Studio 2005. By simply doing a "File -> Open -> Web Site..."
you can open up a site and just start editing files. No need to create a project or add files to it first.
In fact you'll find that there are a lot fewer files involved in brand new web projects in Visual Studio 2005
(3 vs. the 11 in VS2003).
First Run of the IDE
Once you get past the splash screen, the first time you run the new Visual Studio it'll ask you
to choose the default environment settings.
This allows you to customize the look and feel of the development environment to best handle
the tasks you're going to be doing.
The first time I just selected "General Development Settings" which results in an
environment that looks something like this:
If you select "Web Development Settings" it looks more like this:
Obviously the default layouts are slightly different, but if you look closely you'll notice
that the content on the "Start Page" also changes. Web developers get web developer
targeted content. Now I know it's not a huge deal, but these little touches really do add up
and make for a better new user experience.
Even better, you know those pre-defined profiles, well at any time you can export your settings
and create your own to either share with friends or to import to a different machine. Pretty nifty...
no more spending hours tweaking those window positions whenever you reinstall or get a new machine.
The Code Editor
Since it's where you tend to spend most of your time in a development environment, I'm going to
highlight some of the new features in the code editor. Perhaps the most useful are the new
Code Snippets. By simply right clicking where you want the code and selecting "Insert Snippet..."
you get prebuilt code inserted ready to be edited and used. Even better, you can assign shortcuts
to snippets. For example, by typing "conEmail" followed by the tab character, the code to
send an email is automatically added.
Another new addition to the development environment are Smart Tags. The new tags make
common tasks that are related to the context of your work easily available. For example, After I added a
GridView control to my Web Form, a Smart Tag appears on the control that shows some common GridView related
tasks that you might want to do next.
The last major improvement I'm going to mention is the new HTML editor. The design view has been greatly
imporved and produces XHTML 1.1 by default, but you can select other target levels to help you produce HTML
for your target audience. The coolest part of the new HTML editor is the Tag Navigator.
Not only does using it allow you to easily move around your HTML document, you can also collapse areas
of the document that you aren't currently working in in order to streamline things while you work.
Notice how in the screen below, the content of the first two table rows is collapsed and line numbers
18-24 and 26-32 are hidden from view.
The other thing to notice is the bar at the bottom that indicates each level of the document.
By simply clicking on one of the tabs, the corresponding element in the HTML file is automatically selected.
See For Yourself
While I've barely scratched the surface of the product, I hope this quick look at Visual Studio 2005
has made you want to take a look at it for yourself. Even if you can't justify going out and buying one of the
full blown versions, you owe it to yourself to at least check out one of the Express Editions or
take a test-drive of the 90-day trial version. I think after spending a little time with them
you'll be convinced that Visual Studio 2005 is, by far, the best Visual Studio ever.
More Information
|
