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Visual Studio 2013 Review
Received a friendly email from Microsoft that visual studio 2013 was available. I am currently on 2010, as 2012 seemed not that useful and had lots of complaints about the UI.
However, with Windows 8, .NET 4.5, and SQL 2012 not supported by 2010, it seems like time for an upgrade. Let's try it out...

Download Web Installer from MSDN - About 10 minutes.
Install - No issues. Easy to install. About 15 minutes.

Open VS2013. Asked to "sign in". Not sure what that's all about.
5 minutes to research.
Looks like it will 'sync my user settings' as well as track me forever. Doesn't seem worth it, as my only settings are "C# blue". Let's skip this step ("not now") and see what happens.

Next step: Choose your settings and color theme. This is a relief after what I heard about 2012 turning everything gray (until the service pack).
I asked it to apply customizations from the previous version. We'll see how much it actually picks up.
Wait 3 minutes. Just like every other previous VS; okay...
Start Page looks okay. But there's a surprising amount of "purple" for what is supposed to be a blue theme. It's hurting my eyes.

Noticed that since I didn't sign in, it says it's a 'trial version'. Under FILE/Account Settings, it let me enter my MSDN product key for the Professional version.

I copied my old VS 2010 project to a new folder, deleted the source control binding file, and opened it to see what happened.
Somehow it still knew about TFS. Possibly because of the user settings. So it asked if I wanted to 'contact this server to try to enable source control integration'.
Clicked 'Yes', not sure what that was going to do. Hopefully it just wires up the Team Explorer as I was trying to open this project unbound.

Took awhile to open the project. It made several 'non functional changes' to the web apps to open them in VS 2013. No idea what those were.

Hate the new icons in the explorers. They look like they came from Eclipse.

The solution seems to build okay. Clicked 'run' to debug it. Opened fine.

Opened a web page aspx.cs file. All the references are shown as 'missing'

Clean and rebuild solution. This fixed that.

Still don't like the icons in the explorers. Why do they even bother changing these - they were fine in 2010. Yes, I read their explanation. I don't agree.

Clicked 'Check In'. Instead of a nice dialog box with option to check in/check out, it jumps you to the pending changes box docked on the bottom. It's awful. Instead of clicking which files you actually want to check in, there are two sections 'include' and 'exclude' and you have to scroll back and forth to see what you're doing. Even if you scroll, it's very difficult to get a feel for what you included and what you didn't.
Apparently others have noted this too.
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2654486-vs11-bring-back-the-old-pending-changes-window?page=2&per_page=20
I set it to 'Float' and will try to use the include/exclude feature instead of the much more intuitive checkboxes. However, it is still not easy to use. Several windows are now in this one window (builds, changes, team explorer, etc), and it's very difficult to go from one to the other as you can't have different sections open at the same time. There is a weird 'icon' interface to go to 'home' or a new section that is difficult to use.

Checked in my changes... now it's off to the Build Script... which doesn't run.

It turns out there's a "bug" in VS2010 that hardcoded version numbers in build tasks - and the 2013 install didn't modify them. There are some walkthroughs online to open the file in notepad and remove the version numbers - but it still gave errors (fewer). I think the only option is to start a new build task. However, the 'default' starting task was not available to choose from as TFS is still on version 2010. It looks like I have to upgrade TFS to 2013 if I want anything to run... but that's a little scary because it'll be even more work to roll back if it doesn't work.

Based on the ugly UI, difficult to use pending changes window, and inability to convert VS2010 builds, I'm going to leave VS2013 installed, but continue to use 2010. Maybe 2014 will be better.

Created By: amos 10/22/2013 12:52:39 PM
Updated: 10/24/2013 2:58:23 PM