Don't get me wrong in .NET 4.0 being a lifesaver, especially the innovation in WCF that rescued me on a highly distributed application I was working on, and the tidy up in WPF, but there is an enormous amout of work that has gone into the parallel platform, and testing, and debugging, and the team features in TFS, I think I may well decide not to move on, because a lot of the innovation in Visual Studio goes to waste. The Longhorn era has now instilled an agile ethos which is good, but you need to give us time to really appreciate the technology and build mature systems that are now possible.

Personally I bet quite a lot on Silverlight just recently and really don't want the pigs ear that is HTML5 (I know I might get side lined because of this)

The change is good and bad.  Bad in that I'm not stretch armstrong.  Good in that I think Microsoft lit a fire under their own butt to win against the competition.

Keep up?  No way.  Do my best.  Heck yea.

The VSnext decision should be based on must haves.  Our customers will answer that for us.

The VSnext decision should be based on must haves.  Our customers will answer that for us.

My 'must have' for VSnext can be summed up as "a fast and responsive GUI". I still stick with VS2008 because I don't like VS2010's perceived UI sluggishness (fortunately it's nowhere near as bad as Netbeans').

Oh, and the lack of indent-empty-lines a la VS2005.

You might notice that I complain about this in every thread about VS

Issues like that is probably while "IDEs" like Vim aren't going anywhere, anytime soon.

I don't think I am able to keep up as well. But, I think this is mainly because I wasn't able to tackle everything MS has to offer. Stuff like new Tasks and Parralle something is very interesting, but, I hasn't able to try it out. I am not even a good WPF designer as well. I don't know how to use WCF yet. I actually would think there are many forks, like Expression Blend is in another side of programing. So, I guess I just have to learn on the jobs.

I also agree that it's next to impossible to keep up with every option MS is putting out. I haven't touched ASP.NET MVC, EF, WF, WCF, or Silverlight because I'm too busy learning WPF and actually getting work done in WinForms and VB6.

There are simple things Microsoft can add to the core of WPF that wouldn't be very disruptive for developers, like support for East Asian vertical text and vertical UI layout. GPU accelerated effects for OnRender. Multi-pass shader effects for things like OuterGlow. 

support for East Asian vertical text

WPF doesn't support that? That's a pretty big thing to exclude given Microsoft's religious attitude towards localisation.

No it doesn't, and Windows itself has never supported vertical UI layout.

Michael Kaplan's blog is a good resource on this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/22/10066037.aspx

And he has a quote from someone in the WPF dev team:

It was decided not to support vertical layout for East Asian text in the initial release of WPF as part of setting a reasonable limit to the scope for that release. It is a recognized gap that is being considered for a future version.

That was in 2007, and its still not there as far as I can figure out. Notice that there's a RightToLeft property on controls, but no vertical formatting property.

IMO, we don't need any more gargantuan frameworks like WPF or WCF - which I do like but I think within them there's "a much smaller and cleaner" programming model "struggling to get out". We do need more features like LINQ, dynamic support, or async that help simplify, unify, bring order to the other stuff that's already there. 

About the UI - the new extensions system kinda brings the limitations of the current UI model to the fore. A lot of the extensions I like (by themselves) add things to the context menu that are individually useful, but taken together they bloat the context menu to the point where it's unusable. I think there's a question of whether the UI structure scales well enough to handle all the capabilities the program now has, and maybe they should consider a rethink similar to what the Office team did that resulted in the Ribbon (which is not to say that they should copy the ribbon itself!) Although the VS2010 Productivity Power Tools are a good start for a UI rethink (if only they wouldn't crash the IDE all the time ...)

Visual Studio, like Windows, needs to evolve to meet new demands and continue to serve as a powerful IDE and integrated toolset for software engineers. Debuggers evolve. Runtimes evolve. Programming languages and compilers evolve. Libraries evolve. Editor environments evolve.

Let's revisit this thread after "Dev13" ships

C

For me, the need of VS upgrading is driven by the new feature in the .NET Framework, and VS itself works pretty much the same, and the reason against a lightweight texteditor is primarilythe integrated debugger. yes, to me, 'IDE' is pretty much that, 'Intergrated DEbugger'.

That said, I do hop VS can be more modularized, and those mountains of features can be selectively installed / loaded, I remember its actually a considered goal in the early days of planning for Dev10, but obviously the transition to WPF, the hardworks for WP7 and much more heavy tasks have put this feature aside, I hope it will rise again for Dev11.

3 hours ago, Charles wrote

Let's revisit this thread after "Dev13" ships

well, wont they just skip this version like Office 12 -> 14 ??

You've never been able to "know it all" in this field, and it's only going to continue to become more difficult. That's actually true in most fields. However, if you learn the basics, any of the rest can be learned easily when you have a need. So I've never understood the anxiety some people have with this. I actually was interested in this field BECAUSE it's advancing at a quick rate.