VS 2012 – Not as bad as 2010

Recently started using VS 2012. It’s growing on me.  Here’s my first impressions from my current focus as a C#/.Net WPF developer.

The bad

The bad parts are similar to bugs in VS 2010

• MS Test "Now even more unusable than ever":  can’t run tests in current context and all the tests in a project are lumped together so you can’t just look for tests in one class.  Workaround: use ReSharper as your test runner.
• Similarly slow worthless XAML designer.  Workaround: switch to XML view and move on.
  • Checkout performance improvements coming in update 2.  These new numbers are barely acceptable, the current numbers are beyond atrocious.
• Similarly slow to startup, load/reload projects.  Particularly awful when switching between git branches.  Workaround: close the solution, switch, reopen.
• Similarly freezing on reloading projects in large solutions.  Workaround: go for coffee.
• Breaks compatibility with old TFS versions.  Workaround: git tfs and wait for your tfs server to be upgraded.
• It still has this error with the find function, which is by now just a quirk since I’ve seen it so often
• the status bar says "Ready" well before a build completes
  • Error list doesn’t reliably clear when building
• switches from output window to the error list when starting a build
• copying text from the dark theme doesn’t include the background, so its invisible when you paste it somewhere (white text on white background)
• Frequent freezing caused by the XAML editor can be fixed by this PowerShell script (if you must use the XAML editor and for some reason don’t want to switch to XML editor) 

  while($True){
  kill -processname XDesProc.exe*
  Start-Sleep -s 1
  }

• XAML Designer crashes even though I don’t use it.  That’s a powerful bug:

The Good

After 2 years, you would think they could impress right out of the box, but not really, but after you use it for a while, you won’t want to go back.

• Highlighting all instances of a searched word on a page
• Included dark theme is nice
• When changing XAML/XML tags editor changes both tags at once – open and close
• Better intellisense in XAML
• Ignore specific exceptions directly from the dialog.  A big time saver:

• Intellisense is working better in XAML for Static Resources even though I’m in the XML editor (not sure if this comes from VS or R#)

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