Visual Studio 11: New Features Roundup

tim huckaby and cameron skinner, general manager – visual studio ultimate at microsoft, discuss the visual studio 11 dev preview. cameron talks about the exciting new features coming that developers can expect, especially in the application lifecycle management (alm) toolset like: requirements storyboarding tool, managing product backlog through web portal, feature to keep devs in the zone and more!

some highlights

1. storyboarding tab inside powerpoint : make sure requirements flow through the system. nail down the requirements before you start development. more info
2. web portal: manipulate backlog in tfs through a rich reworked web front-end that enables rich features for developers and project teams. more info
3. my work : a feature to help the developer to stay “in the zone” but when they do have to change context we can get them back to speed when they return, quickly. more info

watch the article here .

what’s new for c# developers

msdn : the async feature provides an easy and intuitive way to write asynchronous code. this feature makes asynchronous programming almost as straightforward as synchronous programming.

previously, writing asynchronous code has required you to define callbacks (also referred to as continuations) to capture what occurs after asynchronous operations finish. this complicates your code, and makes routine tasks, such as exception handling, awkward and difficult. by using the async feature, you can call asynchronous methods without writing continuations, and without splitting your code across multiple methods or lambda expressions. the compiler does the hard work for you.

the feature introduces two new keywords, async and await . the async modifier specifies that a method is an async method. when called, an async method returns a task or task(of tresult) , which represents the ongoing work of the method. the task contains information that the caller of the asynchronous method can use, such as the status of the task and its unique id.

typically, the await operator is applied to the returned task. the await operator suspends execution of the method that called the asynchronous method until the task is completed. in the meantime, control is returned to the caller of the suspended method.

for more information, see asynchronous programming with async and await (c# and visual basic) .

what’s new for javascript developers

• intellisense enhancements. intellisense performance is improved and feature support is enhanced, as described in this section. to customize behavior of the javascript code editor and intellisense, on the menu bar, selecttools, options, text editor. for more information, see javascript intellisense overview .

• support for ecmascript 5 and the htlm5 dom.

• parameter help improvements. you can provide intellisense for fields, function overloads, and variables by using /// code comments.

• signatures in statement completion. you can see function signatures on the right side of the statement completion list.

• immediate feedback. intellisense includes statement completion for identifiers in the active document when accurate information about objects is not available. for more information, see statement completion for identifiers .

• implicit references. you can control which objects are available in the global scope by using reference groups. to configure reference groups, on the menu bar, choose tools, options, text editor, javascript,intellisense, references. for information about references, choose f1 on specific ui elements.

• breakpoints. you can set breakpoints on specific locations in a single line of code. for example, in the code var y = 5; var x = 10;, you can just set the breakpoint on var x = 10;.

• script loader. delay-loaded scripts are now loaded in the development environment, which allows intellisense to provide information about the script objects.

• brace matching. matching braces are highlighted when the cursor is on the left side of an opening brace or on the right side of a closing brace.

• outlining. new navigational aids include collapsible functions in the editor.

• go to definition. you can put your cursor in a function and press f12 (or right-click and select go to definition) to open the javascript file that contains the definition of the function. the page opens at the location in the file where the function is defined. go to definition is not supported for generated files.

• drag-and-drop references. you can drag .js files from solution explorer to the javascript code editor, where they are added as references. references added in this manner are put at the top of the page in the code editor.

read more here .

source: http://blog.jerrynixon.com/2012/02/visual-studio-11-new-features-preview.html