musingstudio

When I first installed Visual Studio 2012, I was taken aback at how awful the user interface looked and felt (and it seems thousands of other people had the same opinion). Fortunately, several articles have appeared explaining how to revert VS2012 to a similar look to that supported by VS2010:

• How to install the VS2010 theme
• How to turn off capitalised menus
• How to revert to VS2010 icons (method 1)
• How to revert to VS2010 icons (method 2)

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2012 Revamped

I wouldn’t normally go to this amount of effort to customise an application, but in my eyes the Visual Studio team got this so wrong that I had no choice. Furthermore, I don’t think VS2012 gave us so much more than VS2010 in terms of C++11 standard compliance that it was worth the effort! However, Herb Sutter has announced a VS2012 upgrade to provide several sort after C++11 features – hopefully that this upgrade will make it worth the pain.

I just read a tweet from John Robbins about this feature that I’d never encountered in Visual Studio 2010 onwards (probably because it’s only available in VS2010 Ultimate and VS2012 Ultimate) – IntelliTrace/Historical Debugging.  This looks really useful for debugging – you can roll back and forward in time without having to continually re-run your program trying to catch the exact sequence of events that led to a bug.