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First Look At Visual Studio 2012


(You will love coding once again…)

Microsoft has released its latest version of Visual Studio 2012, evaluation copy can be freely downloaded from the microsoft site.

Visual Studio 2012 was earlier known as Visual Studio 11. Visual Studio 2012 has great features compares to Visual Studio,2010, look and feel has been changed drastically. Visual Studio icon is changed from to

Let start with the new functionalities introduced in Visual Studio 2012

Start Page
Visual Studio 2012  start page is very nicely designed,lots of new features such as "Quick Launch" ,"Search Work Items" , improved team explorer windows has been introduced.















Recent Project List

Though this was available in earlier version of Visual Studio, remove from the list option is not newly available, you can remove unwanted projects from the “Recent” list by selecting “Remove From List” option. (Right Click on project which you want to remove from the list, select “Remove From List” )

Even you can see the latest Visual Studio GUI in the following screen shot.













Visual Studio Dark Theme
I have seen so many developer, they don’t like default Visual Studio GUI color and they like to code using dark editor, most of them go to Tools→ Options and change default color and fonts.

 
But now you can do this by just changing Visual Experience. Select Tools →Options ,click on General from Environment section. You have option to select “Dark” or “Light”. This is really cool stuff. You can even download themes online.














Visual Studio Installation Engine Improvement
Visual Studio 2012 installation is become very user friendly as compared to previous version of Visual Studio. You can save almost 25 % of installation time and saves about 2.5 GB of the space. There is a lots of improvement in installation engine.























Other Features

Metro Style Application Development

This is the great feature, and only available for Window 8 operating system. To develop metro style application, you need to download and install the Windows 8 Release Preview Evaluation copy which is freely available on the Microsoft site. Once you install Window 8 Release Preview, install Visual Studio 2012 .

Select File →New → Project which will open “New Project” window. Select Visual C# or Visual Basic from the Template (my favorite is Visual C#) and go to Windows Metro style.

Here you have options to select what kind of Metro style applications you want to develop.

(Note: Metro style application is only available for .Net Framework 4.0 and .Net Framework 4.5)

 

Code Clone Detection


This is the new feature introduced in Visual Studio 2012, this helps you to find out similar codes in the project. Normally developers copy existing code from the project to develop new functionality, but with this “copy and paste” tendency, developers introduce lots of bugs.

For example, I have a code in project to fetches employee details and now there a new requirement where apart from employee details, employee department also need to be fetched. As a developer my tendency is to just copy and paste code which fetches employee details and make the changes appropriately to fetch department details. But here I may be introducing new kind of defects, such as mismatch in column names et.

Now as a developer, I want to find out which are all places I have cloned my code. Use close detection from Visual Studio 2012 RC.

In following code, I have copied “GetEmployeeName” code to get “GetEmployeeDepartment”.


















Select code snippet for which you want to find code clones, right click and select “Find Matching Clones in Solution”











You will get following result for the code clones. If you look at above example, though method name has been changed from “GetEmployeeName” to “GetEmployeeDepartment”  still it detects as code clone, indeed this is great feature of Visual Studio 2012.







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