A New Look for Visual Studio 2010

At the PDC and TechEd EMEA last year we described our new editor support built on the WPF technology in .NET Framework 4.0. Today I’m happy to reveal the new UI for Visual Studio, also built on WPF:

In this image you can see several areas of concentration:

• Reduced clutter and visual complexity by removing excessive lines and gradients in the UX and modernized the interface by removing outdated 3D bevels
• Placed focus on content areas by opening negative space between windows and drawing attention to the current focus with a dominant accent color and a distinctive background
• Added an inviting new palette to make VS 2010 more distinctive

In the following image you can see floating documents which allows you to utilize multiple monitors while designing your project and writing code:

This image shows new support in the editor for outlining:

• Triangle glyphs in the margin are used to collapse or expand your code blocks
• Collapsed sections of code are marked with an empty triangle (pointing straight) as well as a set of ellipses
• Colors on the margin indicate edits that have been made

The New Project dialog has also gotten an update to include online template viewing, a search box, and easier navigation. Multi-targeting remains in this version but now with .NET Framework 4.0 included as an option:

Visual Studio has a very broad and rich ecosystem of extensions written by our partners and folks like you. In VS2010 we wanted to make it easier for you to find those extensions and install them. We’ve enabled the new Extension Manager for this purpose:

With the Extension Manager you will be able to browse for templates and tools online and install them easily into the Visual Studio environment. The next public release of VS will have this new functionality and we’ll be hooking up the online capabilities through the Visual Studio Gallery as part of the final release.

These designs were developed and tested for user feedback by our User Experience team and implemented by the VS Platform team (excellent job!).

We hope you like the new look and feel of Visual Studio 2010. You’ll be able to play with these bits when we release Beta 1 which we are working hard on right now (no formal announce date just yet, stay tuned).

Enjoy!