“Don’t put it out with your boots, Ted!”

Visual Studio is the fundamental tool used to create a good majority of the software for Microsoft’s operating systems, and has been for, well, a very long time. New releases tend to be inexorably linked to new language features or versions. Also typically, each new release has brought new features, and improvements to performance and usability.

With every new release of Visual Studio I have been party to, the upgrade was an improvement. .NET (aka 2003), 2005, 2008, 2010… I upgraded and never looked back (with the exception of the loss of VB6 perhaps… but it really did need to go).

Until Visual Studio 2012.

Maybe Microsoft thought forcing developers to develop in a low-fi tool would encourage good low-fi app design. Maybe they thought we needed a break from being productive. I don’t know.

They have removed WIDELY used features (setup projects anyone?), and dramatically uglified the interface. They have reduced the number of things that get code highlighting, and reduced the number of colors used to highlight. HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY BE CONSIDERED A GOOD THING?

Go ahead, try searching Google for “Visual Studio 2012 looks”… here is what you will find:

(FYI: I’m pretty sure BING is filtering such suggestions – I just checked)

Top suggestions:
“Visual Studio 2012 looks horrible”
“Visual Studio 2012 looks like crap”

Top results?
“Visual Studio 2012 is ugly as hell” (Funny, because it’s a “deferred” Microsoft connect bug
Visual Studio 2012 is so ugly, I actually cried.

Does anybody know who is to blame for this? Given the pervasiveness of ugly in all of Microsoft 2012 products (seriously Microsoft, a touch-centric interface on a server operating system? What were you thinking?), you would think there must be somebody high up that deserves a flaming bad of poop…

Let’s just hope he (or she) takes it better than Sasquatch