Visual Studio 11 by Default

I installed Visual Studio 11 a few weeks ago to try it out when it came out. I didn’t have too much time to play with it plus I was running it side by side with Visual Studio 2010 and it just didn’t sit well with me especially considering they changed the color them and it changed some of my icons in Visual Studio 2010 which looked odd.

This weekend I finally wiped both Visual Studio 2010 and 11 and started from scratch. The installation was blazing fast, maybe less than 10 minutes. I remember the old days of Visual Studio 2003 taking like an hour!

Anyway, got everything installed, fired up a project for work which is versioned controlled via TFS. Everything seems to work okay. I had to manually adjust a line in my solution file though to reflect it’s a 2010 solution. One gotcha it seems to have is it cannot open our Load Tests projects but it’s a bit difficult to debug what’s going on but this isn’t the highest requirement and we can look into it.

While I was reading about some of the new features one that caught my eye was that now unit test frameworks are pluggable which means you don’t need an extension ot external tool to run unit tests within Visual Studio. This helps us a lot as we don’t use MS Test and use nUnit. It also gives you code coverage!

You can find more about that here.

So for now, I’m opting to make 11 my default IDE for development from now on.