Visual Studio 2012: Not your mother's IDE

By Patrick Hynds

September 28, 2012 — (Page 4 of 6)
Backward compatible... mostly
While frequent releases of Visual Studio are overall a good thing, they can lead to a particularly bothersome problem with versioning of project files. In past versions, opening and saving a project in the latest version of Visual Studio poisoned it for use in older versions. This is particularly annoying during the transition of teams to the new tool set, but now 2012 projects can be opened in Visual Studio 2010 without any issues. With this good is a bit of potential bad related to versioning of .NET Frameworks. Visual Studio 2012 comes with .NET Framework 4.5, which is an upgrade from version 4.0. Technically, these two versions are not side-by-side capable, but after upgrading to version 4.5, you may still target both versions on the same system.

In most cases, the upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5 will not cause problems, but there are circumstances (such as relying on reflection, for those of us who wrote code with interim builds and beta versions of Visual Studio) where there could be issues due to these changes. Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman pointed out in his blog that the relationship between .NET 4.0 and 4.5 is virtually the same that worked well for .NET 2.0 with regard to .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5. Most assume that changes did not occur to the base class libraries of .NET 2.0 as new features were added with the latter two iterations, but this is not 100% accurate, and the same is expected with the in-place upgrade to .NET 4.5.

LightSwitch now ships as part of Visual Studio instead of as a bolted-on add-in, which it was before. This is more a testament to the coming of age for LightSwitch, though I do expect it will enjoy more adoption now that it has been included in the package.
Enterprise developers that are adept at manipulating their own databases will really appreciate the new SQL Object Explorer. It is more like SQL Server Management Studio, including allowing you to drill down to the column level to see data types and keys.

Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the CES 2009 spotlight to announce the availability of betas for the upcoming version of Windows. Preview versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have been distributed to testers, with general availability coming tomorrow Read More...