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This article is not meant to present an exhaustive and comprehensive list of new features. Between the new explorers, code editors, search and replace, quick launch and numerous other features, it will be immediately apparent that Visual Studio 2012 is at least as compelling an upgrade as Visual Studio 2010 was. As you will see, the folks at Microsoft have listened to the development community, making this the best Visual Studio to date. In this article, I’m going to briefly discuss some of the new features with the tooling in Visual Studio. What makes the new Visual Studio such a dramatic upgrade is that it coincides with the new Windows 8. NET and the CLR, we have the new Windows Runtime (WinRT) at our disposal. Another 10 years has gone by and we now have a new Visual Studio. NET and that common IDE thing Heinen talked about nearly 10 years earlier, was a reality. In 2002, Microsoft released Visual Studio. In a few short years, COM and interoperability were common place. To this software developer, Heinen made a lasting impression on me. And yet, the session was very well received. Candidly, this was nothing short heresy to the FoxPro crowd. In his keynote, Heinen had sketched a plan about the idea of having a common IDE were the developer could pick his language of choice, that perhaps regardless of language, code would be compiled to some common base.
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At that time, during the Microsoft FoxPro DevCon in Orlando, Florida, Roger Heinen, then Senior Vice President in Microsoft’s Developer Division, talked about the future. Rainer represented a watershed moment for Windows developers as the promise of a unified language environment had finally been delivered.įor you history buffs, Microsoft’s unified language strategy dates back to at least October, 1993.
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It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since Visual Studio.
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Here we are again with a new Visual Studio.
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