I’ve used VS2012 for a couple of days now and have been pleasantly surprised. It’s a lot faster than VS2010, which was an appalling piece of engineering. The dark theme, my personal preference, is basic but pleasant. It doesn’t quite make its way everywhere: property pages, for instance are not only dark theme unaware but 100% as ugly as they were in previous version. The new event log is gorgeous and I’m hoping it’s going to prove useful.
On the other hand, it doesn’t exactly feel finished. Autocomplete on symbols pops under the function documentation tooltip, a bug that seems to have sailed straight past beta testing. They’ve also added a well-meaning feature to look up help on exceptions that just doesn’t reflect the way that exceptions are actually implemented in the .NET Framework. For instance, if you’re having a problem connecting to SQL Server, it’ll send you straight to the general SqlException page. To fix this, they either need to make the feature smarter, or make exceptions in .NET a lot more specific.
Oh yes, and unless you read English in a different way from the rest of the human race, you’ll want to read the contents of this page pretty much straight after booting it for the first time.
Colour Coding 