Like many developers we maintain and develop an extremely large enterprise MFC application. All in all about 1.5 million lines. Asides from the addition of ribbons and a few extra controls we have had very little improvements in how we can work with MFC or native Win32 apps (in fact, the speed has gone down and classwizard seems to have gone from bad to worse to gone). Can you consider:

1. Improving the Dialog editor so that we can lay out dialogs with guides and the extra alignment options that are standard with C# - automatically spacing items correctly and so on.
2. Introduce a standardised feature for resizable dialogs, somewhat akin to C#'s docking or attaching.
3. Please, please, please allow us to work on the tabs of a tab control directly. Tab controls are a real pain to work with.
4. Change the class wizard so that a dialog header file doesn't contain its resource ID in the header. Having '#include "resource.h"' in the header of every class is a pain and causes numerous conflicts in applications that have many dialogs.

Essentially I'm asking to have the MFC functionality brought up to line with what we have in Windows Forms. Developers who are still using MFC are almost certainly like us in that they are using it because they have a large enterprise solution to maintain. Such developers are professionals using Visual Studio to build big, serious, expensive applications. Whilst improvements in C#, WinForms, WPF, SL and so on are great, MFC has been woefully neglected for years.

Visual studio used to have a kick *** interface. However, everything about the 2012 interface looks.. amateurish.

-The icon looks like something a 3 year old did.

-The lack of depth makes the whole thing jump into my face.

-The upper cased menus are screaming at me (try posting on a forum in all caps... see what the response is).

In a nutshell, whoever designed the interface needs to go back to the grade school I'm sure they dropped out of and finish their education. Maybe get a job at a fast food place running a cash register... Because they have zero talent for making a good looking UI.

We have incredibly high resolution monitors that can render beautiful images. To go all grey (or black) is such a step backwards that I can not believe this really passed user testing.

You'll notice that iPhones went from this type of boring UI and changed to using high res displays with lots of good color. You should have also noticed that this was exactly what people wanted.. and they sold like hotcakes.

In the old days people scrambled to get color monitors just to get away from the ho-hum grayness of working with a machine all day. To send us backwards is irritating at best and abusive at worst.

Please, make Visual Studio look good again.

I don't care about metro, or whatever your calling it these days. I figure it'll take 3 years for you to figure out what a mistake that is and fix it. In the meantime, let me keep the Win7 look.

Note, I wouldn't post anything if I didn't care. I do. I want to use the best. This, well, isn't. It's not even a "good effort". Instead, it looks like something that was slapped together at the last minute.

When working with a large number of projects in a solution, builds and loading of the solution can become quite slow. We are currently working with around 40 projects and Visual Studio is starting to crawl and this is unfortunate since we are aiming at having possibly over 300 total projects part of the solution due to a modular application design but are afraid of doing so due to performance woes. Making Visual Studio better at handling large projects in terms of performance and also in terms of ease of navigating between projects and their contained files will greatly reduce a barrier to scaling large applications.

This idea is in contrast to http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2723735-make-net-4-5-work-on-any-os-that-supports-4-0 and http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3116039-support-xp-for-4-5-until-the-end-of-xp-support-, which I do not support. It is parallel to http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3095632-make-vs2012-not-hide-net-4-0-bugs-when-targeting-, but I think is the converse of it.

Consider a developer who must support customers running Windows XP, and who also is unable or unwilling to debug their applications on a machine separate from their main development machine. Such a developer may feel that he cannot upgrade to Visual Studio 2012, since that installation would replace the .NET 4.0 assemblies on the developer machine, making it impossible for the developer to encounter the fixed .NET 4.0 bugs.

Unfortunately, it is not impossible for their customers to encounter the fixed bugs!

Microsoft should make available a service pack for Windows XP and all other operating system versions which currently support .NET 4.0. This service pack should fix all of the bugs currently fixed in .NET 4.5.

Furthermore, as Microsoft produces service packs for .NET 4.5, there should be a corresponding service pack for .NET 4.0 systems, again targeting those .NET 4.0 bugs fixed by the service pack.

Some of the developers who are unwilling to upgrade to Visual Studio 2012 may be willing to do so if they can require their customers to install a service pack.

This may mitigate some of the ill will and confusion caused by the in-place upgrade of .NET 4.0 by .NET 4.5.