A quick look at the Visual Studio 2017 RC installation and first impressions on the look and feel of the new IDE
My first impressions are really good. The web install genuinely took around 7 minutes and I was up and launching a new Asp.Net Core boilerplate application in a further 2 minutes, allowing for first time customisation and profile configure. That’s zero to hero in under ten minutes which is finally a wait time I can work with and will no doubt encourage non Microsoft Developers to just give it a try. I decided to go for the community edition for simplicity.
The new setup experience
The installer has been written from the ground up and it certainly feels nicer than the typical Microsoft Installer experience of not so long ago. I really like the select what you need approach and add later, which has always been possible but is a cleaner approach where you are selecting your intent rather than a host of individual features typical of a custom install.
It then picked up my profile settings and applied the ‘Dark’ theme that I mostly use.
My first observation from the out of the box experience is that the balance is pretty much right. Familiar enough to navigate without any problems but the new features are available when your interest takes you there. I like the fact that the configuration has added the common elements you would expect to see out of the box. For example, Static Files and IIS Integration. The initial beta release really went for fast start-up of .Net Core but was a pain to keep adding the common initialisation, especially as the namespaces and project configuration types were ever moving.
Out of the box, ‘Use Static Files’ is configured. I must admit, it is a better way round, rather than adding to almost every project as nine times out of ten we will require serving static html files etc.at some point. It also offers a quick and easy way to start developing from any other framework.
I also like that ‘UseIISIntegration’ is alo in by default as that is going to be the most familiar to seasoned Asp.Net web devs.
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It’s worth showing all files to see everything residing in the project
As you can see below, we are back to .proj files again and project.json is no longer the central configuration item
What is nice is that intellisense now kicks in for the project file. As you start typing the namespace, service calls are being made to show available packages
Ctrl-F5
A very quick look and I can say interest and confidence is high with the new offerings.
Definitely worth a keeping an eye on the Visual Studio Blog for frequent updates in this space at the moment.
If you would like some hands on expertise for your business feel free to reach via my company assemblysoft or checkout some other musings via my blazor.net and azure blog here carlrandall.net
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