Visual Studio 2012 - At a Glance

I saw someone else install Visual Studio 2012 today - yes I quite literally mean a glance - and I felt so strongly about it that I am writing this blog post. I am warning you now that this is really just me grumbling so don't expect to be enlightened.

I suppose I have to start with the lovely grey interface that has been the talk of the town since it was released. I know that the world and his wife has already had their 2 cents about this but I really don't understand why they made this decision. I have heard it said that the reason they chose it is because they think that the colourful nature of previous versions is too distracting. I honestly don't know who they were observing to draw this conclusion. It is simply ridiculous. Go into any UK office on a grey day and I would bet that everyone is glummer than they are on a sunny day. I generally see that if people are happier they work better and grey things do not make people happy. So in my eyes all that they have achieved is to make office life that little bit more miserable. Luckily for me I can make it pretty with a plugin so I will survive - although it doesn't change the icons.

Does anyone else see the resemblance?

Loading times appear to be just as slow as, if not slower than, 2010. It also crashed after we opened it the first time so we had to sit through it twice. The creation of an MVC project took a whole second to add each file that would be in the new project before we could do anything. I could tell because there were handy status notifications for each one. I am starting to think that this is a trend with Microsoft products. The main difference I noticed between Office 2007 and 2010 seems to be that the later takes twice as long to load. They have tried to disguise this by giving you status updates on how loading the application is coming along but I am not fooled. But who cares about load times anyway? It's not like we need to open and close Visual Studio all day so I think I could let it off for that.

The thing that I really don't like, and you are welcome to call me petty, is the shouty capitals. If the colourful icons were too distracting then I am sure being constantly shouted at will be too. I really hate them. Luckily you can turn them off so that one shouldn't be a problem either.

So now I have got that out of my system all I need to do is get over it and start using it because lets face it... I don't have much choice.