Blog
Welcome to our blog. We hope that these pages provide an insight into us, our products and how we develop them. Please feel free to write to us if you have anything to add to any of the posts here.
UI changes in Visual Studio 11 - what do you think?
Friday 24th February, 2012
A very interesting MSDN blog post about the forthcoming Visual Studio 11 landed this morning titled Introducing the New Developer Experience.
The bottom line - it's grey...very grey - even the icons, which are monochrome glyphs:
As someone who finds vast expanses of grey hard on the eye my first instinctive reaction was "Yuck!". I personally find the Visual Studio 2008 visual style to be about right for me - Visual Studio 2010 feels a bit too glaring (as well as being dog slow to start, but that's another debate....), and I really don't think I could use an IDE as grey as this one all day without feeling quite low about the whole experience.
We all have to make up our own minds, of course - and this isn't necessarily representative of what we will have to use on a daily basis. I do have to wonder if MS are trying just a little too hard to "reinevent the world" again though - and as a plug-in developer I certainly don't relish having to have to maintain yet another set of icons (monochrome this time) just for Visual Studio 11!
If you use Visual Studio on a daily basis, it might be a good idea to make Microsoft aware of your thoughts on such a major change in the user interface before they become entrenched in the product.
Visual Lint 3.5 has been released
Tuesday 14th February, 2012
We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 3.5 is now available.
Visual Lint 3.5 is the second Visual Lint 3.x release, superseding Visual Lint 3.0. As a minor update, it also accepts existing Visual Lint 3.0 licences; per-user Visual Lint 1.x and 2.x licences must however be upgraded to work with this version in the same way as they would for Visual Lint 3.0.
Full details of the changes are available in the new Visual Lint online documentation, but for us the highlight is the arrival of VisualLintConsole - a command line version of Visual Lint designed for use in both build server and workstation environments:
VisualLintConsole brings exactly the same sort of incremental, parallelised analysis as the interactive versions of Visual Lint to the command line environment. We have had it running on our CruiseControl.NET continuous integration server for several months now, and a very useful tool it has proved to be. If you are worried about the analysis taking too long, you can even distribute the analysis over an IncrediBuild grid or set a limit on how long the analysis should run for.
To use VisualLintConsole in Build Server and non-interactive environments, a new Build Server Edition licence will shortly become available. In desktop installations, VisualLintConsole can be used with the existing Standard, Professional and Enterprise Edition licences provided it is run in an interactive user session. To use VisualLintConsole in Build Server and non-interactive environments, a new Build Server Edition licence will shortly become available. In desktop installations, VisualLintConsole can be used with the existing Standard, Professional and Enterprise Edition licences provided it is run in an interactive user session.
None of this takes anything away from LintProject Professional of course - it just now happens to have gained a bigger brother! Competitive upgrades will become available to all LintProject Professional customers shortly, so if you are interested in upgrading your existing LintProject Professional installations to use VisualLintConsole instead please feel free to contact us so we can prepare an appropriate upgrade package for you.
Incidentally, interactive versions of Visual Lint 3.5 also have the ability to be selectively enabled and disabled without unloading them from the development environment. When "Off" Visual Lint will lie dormant, and analysis functions etc. will be unavailable. In floating and site licence installations, turning Visual Lint "off" in this way will obviously release a licence for use by other users on the network.
We welcome any feedback you can offer us on the new version.
