I was previously using VS2013, but after running 14 just once, I saw no reason to go back. I thought I’d jot down some notes on my experience of this update. A quick caveat though: VS14 is a CTP, so if you’re thinking about using it to maintain the code for your nuclear reactor, then probably don’t.
Faster
Okay, so this is my perception. I’m working on a personal project on the train to and from work. VS14 loads almost a station before VS2013 did. Now, if that’s not a fair and accurate benchmark, I don’t know what is!
Debugging
One particularly cool feature is that you can see the CPU execution time for previous statement during debugging. Typically, this is a meaninglessly low figure of x milliseconds; but occasionally it shows an unexpectedly high figure.
This can be dangerous, because if you saw a statement that took 30ms, which executed once when the user presses a button in your app, you might think nothing of it… unless all the other statements take 2ms. At this point, you might spend 1/2 hour trying to work out what the bottleneck is. You might even find it: and speed up your app by 28ms.
Refactor
Shift-Alt-F10 on a non-existent method now gives you a preview of what it’s about to do. Possibly not the most useful feature in the world to be honest, but if you want a field and it tries to create a property then you know (obviously, if you’d just read the description of what it will create, that would also tell you). The Using statement tells you where it will create the statement:
However, I can’t find any way you can affect the preview - which would have been a nice feature; for example, say you wanted to create a public field rather than internal; or, you wanted to define a constant and give it a constant value.
Light bulbs now appear next to potential refactoring. One example was an unnecessary using statement I had. It had turned grey; I didn’t understand this until I noticed that a light bulb had appeared next to it, which helpfully informed me that I didn’t need the statement.
Also, code analysis seems to be an opt-in thing now - rather than the previous version which seemed to constantly kidnap whichever tab it was on.
It is still a CTP
Line numbers were turned on in VS2013 and were off in 14.