The Story of Synchronized Settings - The Visual Studio Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs.

This blog from the Visual Studio team provides an insight into how and why synchronized settings came about.

I like the principle of the synchronized settings, but logging in every time? Really? And setting up Visual Studio takes 5-10 minutes once; it’s not something I have to do every time. I’ve got two machines I work on: one with two screens, one with one screen. And the single screen setup has a far better resolution than the dual screen. How I want my IDE to look differs greatly.

For my part and for most of the developers I speak to, my biggest frustration is with how files you have open are closed when you open a solution, and then when you close that solution later these files re-appear. Essentially this is part of the “Suspend and Resume My Work” mechanism installed in Visual Studio 2012. I’m not convinced by it. I’ll have separate versions of Visual Studio open if I want to work on different pieces of work simultaneously.

When I showed the devs at work the new pop out Pending Changes window, the response was “all windows should be pop out”. I agree with this one; what’s the point in having a highly customizable IDE if I am forced to use the Team Centre Hub, and can only have one of those windows open at any one time.

In the blog post referenced there’s a section called “Fast Is Good”. My initial impressions of VS 2013 is that it was faster than VS 2012, which was certainly more stable than VS 2010. I guess you can’t get everything right, but in terms of performance and stability of the software they are doing well.

It’s worth noting that this is a Preview, not the final version of VS 2013, and the Visual Studio team have shown some response to the feedback given by users (ie more colour and pop out pending changes window), and feedback can be sent in the IDE using the Visual Studio Feedback Tool (the smiley/frown button) or file a bug at the Visual Studio Connect site. Like a friend once said to me “there’s nothing negative about pointing out a problem, it’s only negative if you do nothing about it”.