Saturday, May 23, 2009

Trying Out VS 2010

I downloaded the VS Professional 2010 bits last night, as I’ve been looking forward to testing out the next version for a while. The new WPF code editor has got me very excited (yeah I know – sad :)) due to the new possibilities for writing some cool UI extensions, like those which can be found at the Visual Studio Gallery.

One of the first things I wanted to try out where the new Sub() based Lambda’s in VB, which was not available in the language for VS 2008, though Func() was. As I sat down to start a new console application, I was a bit disappointed. Here is the code I was working with at the time:

Public Sub Main() 
    Dim k As String() = { "F", "B", "C" }
    k.ForEach(
End Sub

When I type the ‘(‘ character, VS started to churn a bit, think about it for a bit longer and then crash :( Humph. OK it’s a beta, so things like this are going to happen. Unfortunately it happens a lot for me. Even when creating a new class and instantiating it, the second I type a dot ‘.’ next to the variable name, I get a crash. Grrr.

Oh well. Hopefully by beta 2, things like this will have been ironed out. All in all, I’m really looking forward to VS 2010 since there is promised SharePoint support in the IDE (inside the server explorer, where you’ll be able to navigate SharePoint sites directly) and more SharePoint project templates. Cool. Having worked on many SharePoint projects, I can say that the development experience can prove frustrating at times.

Personally, it would be nice if they got rid of the need for SharePoint Designer and integrated everything into VS, giving users the option to use either for their SharePoint work. My reason for this request? SharePoint Designer is a heap of junk and I detest having to use it. But hey, that’s for another blog post…..