Letters from Readers
Reader Feedback: Visual Studio 2012 Arrives
Microsoft released Visual Studio 2012 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 during the final month of the summer, providing developers with the next wave of tools designed for building Windows 8 applications.
Microsoft released Visual Studio 2012 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 during the final month of the summer, providing developers with the next wave of tools designed for building Windows 8 applications. VSM Executive Editor Kathleen Richards reported on the Aug. 15, 2012, release milestone in "Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 Released to Developers". Readers offered early reviews of the updated IDE and framework.
Flat UI is the biggest turnoff in adopting Visual Studio 2012. All the icons are made up with poor imagination. To me, it seems like Microsoft is pushing us into the Windows 3.1 era, except the icons were bigger during that time.
Krunal
Singapore
Visual Studio 2012 is a solid upgrade on the C++/Standard Template Library front. Not using a product because of its UI is plain dumb.
Michel Lemay
Posted Online
"Not using a product because of its UI is plain dumb."
Have you used it for the past several months? Do you also use Visual Studio 2010? If so, and if you can use it, then that's great. More power to you. But there are quite a number of us who really are having a very hard time physically focusing on the darn thing as it causes us massive eye strain -- I kid you not. Also, I (and many others) am finding it less productive because it's difficult to pick things out quickly. Case in point: In Visual Studio 2010 if you have hundreds of files in the Solution Explorer, the color usage allowed us to quickly find what we needed. Now with Visual Studio 2012, it's an exercise in patience and anger management. The icons are also a pain, and it takes longer to find things. If that's not enough, take a look at the Architecture Explorer and try drilling down into a class, and you'll find no clear window separation but rather a sea of gray -- everything blends too much. In general, I find my eyes are looking for graphical detail in this UI that just isn't there. There's no reason why Microsoft needed to not provide us with the "classic" theme that we're all familiar with.
Tom
Posted Online
All the complaints about the UI are kind of taking away from what we should really be discussing, which is the actual functionality of the product. Look... Microsoft already conceded that the ALL CAPS menu probably wasn't for everybody and included an option to turn it off. As far as UI themes go, a freely available add-in lets you completely customize the UI colors. The only thing we really don't have control over is how the icons look, and this is more of a "getting used to it" problem than a true usability issue. Get over the UI already!
Name Withheld
Posted Online
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This story was written or compiled based on feedback from the readers of Visual Studio Magazine.