Thursday 21 May 2009

Unity in VS2010

I'm currently playing with the public beta of Visual Studio 2010; as a beta, the obvious choice is to run it on a VM (although I also have it "on the metal" on a spare machine). I also mentioned previously about using Unity mode in VMware.

At the current time, VS2010 is looking good on a VM, but there are a few glitches to beware (thinking of VMware in particular):

  • It doesn't like the DirectX acceleration option (presumably some glitch between WPF and the emulator) - this leaves it a little shaky in "console" mode, but plain freaky in "unity" mode
  • The way the window system works means that "unity" sees everything as separate windows, and attaches badges to both menus and popups (intellisense etc):

image

Fortunately, you can fix both issues with some minor tweaks to the vmx file:

unity.showBadges = "FALSE"
mks.enable3d = "FALSE"

With those tweaks in place, VS2010 is a happier place to be - and we can get on with the important work of playing with "dynamic", variance, and all the other .NET 4.0/C# 4.0 features ;-p