Visual Studio 2013 Preview Hands-On

It’s quite the big week now. In terms of Microsoft Software that is. Microsoft has unveiled preview after preview this week. Yesterday they released previews for Windows 8.1, Visual Studio 2013 and Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5.1. That’s just one day after releasing previews for Windows Server 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014 and System Center 2012 R2.

I’ve installed Windows 8.1 Preview on a Hyper-V machine, and also installed Visual Studio 2013 Preview. Now I’m ready to take it for a spin.

The Visual Studio start experience. So far it looks a lot like Visual Studio 2012, which is good. From what I’ve read, they’ve worked a lot with the TFS experience, which wasn’t that good in 2012.

Since I’m mainly a Web Developer, I’ll test the Web Application Features first.

At this point I’ve already found some new features. Some new ASP.NET Project Templates, like Facebook Application and Mobile Application. Personally I don’t like Templates, since they take away pretty much all my control over the Project. For instance, when creating a Web Project from the Mobile Template, there are about 40 Library References automatically added to my Project. Maybe I’m old school, but I prefer to add References only when I need them, and after some serious consideration.

This of course has nothing to do with the new Visual Studio. It’s more of a personal note :)

When pulling up Team Explorer I notice some new (long awaited) features. Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2012 got a lot of both hate and love, since it changed pretty much everything from previous versions. In Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft has been listening to the the developers and improved Team Explorer.

The Pending Changes Window can now be separated from the Team Explorer Window, and be placed anywhere in the IDE. This is something I’ve missed since Visual Studio 2010.

I’ll pause my tests for now and head out for some lunch. During which I’ll seriously consider if I should install Visual Studio 2013 Preview on my production machine.