The Visual Studio loading screen in Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1. Unlike the March CTP, this is a beta of the Professional Edition instead of Team Suite.
The main VS interface looks about the same in beta 1 as in the March CTP. The fit and finish has been improved on some elements, though.
Among the fit and finish improvements are the new menu hover styles. It's definitely nothing to write home about, but it does give VS a nice "polished" look.
To test the beta today, I've opened the Code Converter web site. Here we see the Split view working with the new Telerik RadToolTip (in the "Prometheus" control suite).
While "Orcas" looks like it tried to import my toolbox settings from VS 2005, it failed to copy the RadControls toolbox items correctly. These entries must be removed and manually re-added to get RadControls back in the toolbox.
JavaScript IntelliSense worked MUCH better this time around. The TypeLibBuilder errors from the last CTP are long gone. Here we see some of the ASP.NET AJAX IntelliSense that worked right away. The only thing I don' t like about this IntelliSense is that it does not tell you what type the selected property returns (unlike its .NET IntelliSense cousin).
Functions are a little easier to work with now. The JavaScript IntelliSense correctly prompts you for values, though I'm disappointed the ASP.NET AJAX functions don't use XML comments to provide more information. Also frustrating is that this JS IntelliSense doesn't relay which properties are optional. In this case, element is not required for the $get() funciton.
To illustrate that point, I only provided the id property of the $get() function and ran my app. Everything worked correctly, proving that the element property is optional. It's too bad JS IntelliSense is not more helpful in that sense.
Adding a reference to a JS file in an assembly in an ASPX page seems to be next to impossible. The /// syntax highlighted here works in JS files but NOT in ASPX files.
You can get IntelliSense to work by using a ScriptManager and attaching a JS file to your pages. Here we see some JS IntelliSense for the RadTabStrip.
And here we some cool JS IntelliSense. The "test" variable is an instance of the JS RadTabStrip. Using dot notation we can see a list of available properties and methods. Pretty cool!
But when I tried to reference the TabStrip JS files in the assembly, I was met with failure again. The problem mostly comes down to not providing the correct name for the assembly resource, but even after examining the TabStrip source code I could not get the correct name for this to work.
On the CSS side of life, there are definitely some new cool tools for working with CSS. There appears to be a problem, though, with the style manager and "~" URLs in link tags. I had to remove the "~" syntax to get my CSS styles to show up in the highlighted "Manage Styles" window.
Once my styles were available, some interesting functionality was revealed. By right clicking on a style in the list, you can easily modify the style or locate all instances of the style in your application.
Finally, I took a look at the new Unit Test tools added to "Oras" Pro. One of the coolest things about "Orcas" Pro is that it will include Unit Test tools previously available only to TFS developers. Here I am using the Wizard to create a new Test project.
The wizard allows you to select the methods that you want to create test stubs for. Very easy, very cool.
The "Settings" button allows you to configure a few options related to the test generation.
Here is a sampling of the code created by the New Test Wizard for a couple of methods in my Web Site.
The Test View enables you to browse your tests and select individual tests to run (or run all tests).
The fun was cut short, though, when did not add a Project Reference to my Web Site when creating my new Test project. And for some reason, I also could not manually add a reference to the Web Site. With no way to reference my Web Site, my tests failed to build. Hopefully the release of "Orcas" will automatically add a Project Reference to a new Test Project if it is created with the Wizard.
