Project Compatibility:-

This is the one feature that I liked a lot. If you have worked on a long running project which involved up gradation to a higher version then you have seen that once you open a project created in earlier version to a new version then it gets converted to new version via Visual studio conversion wizard. Problem with this approach was that a project once upgraded cannot be opened in earlier versions of visual studio. This created nuisance more so since sometimes it takes time to procure licenses for your entire time and we also wanted to save time by converting project at earliest to avoid any issues arising out of conversion. With VS 2011 developer preview Microsoft has done away with conversion wizard and improved compatibility.

Current Cursor line Code Highlighting:-

This is a cute little enhancement which actually saves a lot of time. While working on project many times you do a find which shows results in find window. On double clicking the result it takes you the line where it found the matches but many times I lost the cursor and then used down arrow key to track the movement and position of cursor. Now visual studio highlights line on cursor is placed currently.

Solution Explorer Enhancements

Solution explorer now combines Class view so that you can get more details about the class as you are working..

Quick Launch Box

This is another cool addition to visual studio menu bar which makes it easier to execute commands. As you can see the toolbar is much light weight now with only the commands that you use most often. Rest of the commands can be found by clicking the small dropdown button as shown below. Also see the highlighted Quick Launch(Ctrl+) box

You can see in image below as I type Form in Quick Launch it gives me plethora of options to choose from.

ToolBox

Error List

As you can see in below image, error list window shows 3 error but on typing Messageb it filters out the error which contains Messageb..

Solution Explorer

In next part we will take a look at solution explorer and document management enhancements.