A few unpleasant facts about Visual Studio 2012.
- by Ilya Verbitskiy
I have been playing with Visual Studio 2012 for the last couple of days. New IDE is pretty good, but, unfortunately, I found a few unpleasant facts. First of all, new release is coming without Visual Studio setup projects. I am disappointed, because I am using it for my pet project – Easy Shutdown. The tool is a small widget-like application which allows you to reboot, log out or shut down you PC. I have not done any decision yet, but I would probably migrate to WiX. The second surprise is Microsoft will not add Visual Studio macros to the next release. Since I am lazy guy, I like small hacks using macros. For example I have macros to refresh all projects or attach to IIS. The only way how to solve the problem is to convert your macros to Visual Studio plugin. I have not tried it yet, but I will definitely do in the nearest future. The third fact, I do not like, is Visual Studio default themes. May be somebody like it, but they are hard to adopt after Visual Studio 2010. Fortunately there is a solution. Matthew Johnson released Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor. It comes with a few predefined themes. I really like the Blue one.