Early Look at Visual Studio 2014 CPT-2

July 9th, 2014 | Posted by Vidya Vrat in .NET | C# | Visual Studio

Microsoft released the CTP2 of Visual Studio 2014 today July 8th 2014.

In my previous News item I mentioned that biggest challenge in trying Visual Studio 2014 was Side-by-Side installation. This issue is claimed to be resolved in this new CTP2 release which can be downloaded from here , whereas I would suggest that you try it with your own responsibility and things might break.

What is CTP anyways?

CTPs are previews for the next major release of Visual Studio. These Visual Studio CTPs are intended to promote continuous feedback between early adopters and the Visual Studio development team.

CTPs have Limitations

CTPs are provided for testing and feedback purposes only. CTPs are unsupportedEnglish-only releases. They are not subject to final validation and are not intended for use on production computers, or to create production code.

Some New COOL Features Added in CTP2

  • Save and Apply Custom IDE Layouts. You can now save and apply custom layouts for tool windows in the IDE. The Save Window Layout and Apply Window Layout commands are under the Window Menu and you can also rename, reorder, and delete layouts from Manage Window Layouts.
  • Light Bulb Editor Adornment. How many times have you found yourself stuck in a complex syntax issue or compilation error which doesn’t seem to go away? I have always wished that there was a legitimate way to have some options displayed as solution to the problem. Microsoft Introduced, Light Bulbs which is an extensible editor adornment to identify and help you fix issues in your code. To use them, place the caret on a line with an issue or hover over an issue and you’ll see a light bulb that lists actions you can take to resolve the problem and even a preview of proposed solutions.
  • Editor Touch Support. All the devices these days are supporting touch. Many software receive direct benefit from the support for touch. Visual Studio Code Editor seem to be an exception to be fully benefited with touch, as development required typing. But a Touch support will certainly enables the developers to do some usual things like scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, tap-and-hold for context menus, double-tap for word selection, and line selection by tapping in the margin etc. All such gestures now acknowledged by Visual Studio 2014 code editor. Needless to mention you have to have a Laptop with Touch Support.
  • ALL CAPS. Remember menu names in Capital letters (All CAPS) was kind of hard to read. SO Microsoft has reverted it to be Title Case (Tools, File, View) as it has been used by various Visual Studio releases.  Microsoft Says.. Last week with the RC for Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 we added an option to sentence case menus; in this VS “14” CTP we changed Menu Bar styling to Title Case for everyone to help us get feedback on the change. 

 So Are you Installing?

I wanted to verify few things and so I chose to install and try the CTP2 bits of Visual Studio 2014. My current laptop settings are as follows:

  • Windows 7 Enterprise
  • Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate
  • Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate
  • newly installed Visual Studio 2014 Professional

Continue Reading….. 

 

 

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.