Visual Studio 2012 IDE

The Visual Studio (VS) 2012 integrated development environment (IDE) brings a new look to the user interface along with many features and enhancements that could increase developer productivity. The new look reduces visual clutter and graphical adornments to help developers focus on code.

The Solution Explorer (right pane) provides more functionality than in previous releases, such as the ability to display classes and members (as seen in the expanded RichTextColumns.cs file node here) and search capabilities (the Search Solution Explorer box at the top), which previously required developers to use tools in separate windows.

Code text searching is simplified with an anchored entry box (top right of the code editor window) that highlights text in the code as it is typed (see the occurrences of “System” highlighted here).

The new Preview tab (top right of the code editor window) lets developers browse file content without persisting tabs that must manually be closed. Here the file SuspensionManager.cs was single-clicked in the Solution Explorer window, opening that file in the Preview tab. When a different file is single-clicked, it will open in the Preview tab and the previous file will automatically close. This eliminates tab clutter, which developers had to manage manually in previous versions.