It feels like I’m constantly doing something with some computer or another. This month, it’s the release of Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013. It just doesn’t feel like I’ve had long enough with Windows 8.0 and VS 2012. But here we are again.
So, I uninstalled VS2012 from desktop and laptop, and updated Windows on the laptop to 8.1. Fortunately, I only have to deal with the changes.
Like I said in my recent Windows 8 post, you must simplify your start screen. On my laptop, this is all I really do. Not a whole lot of anything.
One of the nice features no one is talking about is the automatic background colors for tiles. I recall a big blog post from Microsoft about the process and technique of choosing what color to make the background glow for the icons in the taskbar. It was a lot of analyzing the colors in the icon and determining if a complimentary or contrasting color would be the best choice. They seem to have applied that logic to the tiles and I think the effect is much more pleasing than 8.0, as you can compare with the screenshot in my other post.
The other new feature that is going to make a lot of positive waves is the ability to use the desktop background in the start page, as I’ve done. It definitely helps keep the two environments feeling connected. The Start button’s return? Big meh.
I poked around with some of the metro apps, to see how things are progressing on that front. I’m still not impressed.
In programming land, I opened one of my old projects and was met with this warning: “ASP.NET MVC 3 projects have limited functionality in Visual Studio 2013.” Oh good. A link was provided describing how to upgrade the project to MVC 4. The recommended method is to create a new project and copy all your files to it. Uh huh. The manual method involves a lot of steps with changes all over the place. I guess I’ll have to do that once to see how it goes.
But again, it seems I’m working through these things more often. The software development industry always talks about “iterative, continuous improvements”, well, it seems that life is becoming the same way.
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