A Talk on Upcoming Visual Studio Features :

Channel 9 has a video of the Visual Studio IDE Futures presentation given by Weston Hutchins at Tech-Ed 2011 (I realize this was posted in May, so I’m a bit late on this, but I’ve been on vacation). It’s a nice long talk about some of the upcoming features in the next version of Visual Studio.

The new IDE looks similar to the current incarnation, but sports a lot of interesting and welcome features in the areas of commanding, navigation, and tab/document management. Some of the high points, in my opinion:

There’s a “Search IDE” field in the toolbar that allows you to find actual commands, documents and preference panes. This will certainly be a boon to navigating the slew of commands offered by the IDE, as well as really useful when helping users walk through a series of steps remotely, as direction can be given in a form that will disregard any unusual UI customization a user — or slightly different SKU of the IDE — has in place.
Project round-tripping is supported between VS versions (2010 and above) without a conversion step. This is probably built on the infrastructural changes introduced in VS2010, notably the switch to MSBuild for all of the common project types, and is a great thing to finally have.
The solution explorer has a type browser integrated, with fuzzy searching built-in, as well as a “collapse-all” option (finally).
You can pin tabs (to the left of the tab well) and enable “preview tabs,” which appear to be used for automatically opened files (for example those opened during stepping within the debugger) which helps reduce tab clutter.
There are a lot of filtering and searching improvements. You can search within the Add References dialog (which is indexed in the background and thus loads much faster as well). The errors and warnings display also sports some new filtering and search options, allowing you to scope the results to files in the current project or opened files, for example.
Finally, performance is a big focus of this new version, specifically around the areas of memory utilization and long-running operations.

Hutchins’ demo focused exclusively on managed code, and it’s likely that some of the new functionality (the type browsing in particular) may not function as well or at all for native projects, given the state of native code Intellisense.

There was also no mention (that I caught) of my biggest two pet peeves: the execution of build tasks on the UI thread (causing the spinning ring and preventing task output from appearing until task completion) and the occasional loss of mouse responsiveness on 64-bit machines. Strictly speaking, the latter is not a VS bug, but it still drives me crazy whenever it happens. I’m hopefully that the performance improvements will imply a fix to the UI-thread built task problem as well, even though it wasn’t specifically addressed.

In any case, the new features are welcome as are the performance improvements; the next version of VS (my bet is that it will be VS 2012) is looking great.