Upgrading to Visual Studio 2013

Although VS 2012 is the best version of Visual Studio that I've worked with to-date, there are a few features that lack a little bit of polish. In particular, the code review features are so-so. For example, it simply doesn't work when trying to do a code review of a file that has been renamed. Nope. Not gonna do it!

I've purchased my Resharper v8.x upgrade and I'm set to go.

First things first. Time to uninstall VS 2012. This results in a lengthy system restore point process. Since I have used this version for quite a while, there are numerous updates that have been applied and countless Visual Studio-related apps in Control Panel that I'm unsure if I have to uninstall them. We'll soon find out.

Once the uninstall of VS 2012 completed, which surprisingly didn't prompt me for a reboot, I began the installation of VS 2013. With a full install this projects using 12GB of space - not a small app by any stretch.

Funny thing is that while this is running, I'm using SharpDevelop 4.3 to continue my coding and unit testing. Need to stay busy! I actually like SharpDevelop for simpler things, but there are a few things that I miss. For example, our projects use the Microsoft test framework and the refactoring support from Resharper is awesome.

Now as the VS 2013 installer wraps up, it let me know that Hyper-V is turned on and that it added me to the Hyper-V Administrators group. It looks like this was necessary for Windows Phone Emulator support.

After a lengthy reboot due to updates that get applied to Windows, Visual Studio was ready to run. One interesting thing to note was the introduction of a sign-in process now that looks to support sync'ing settings across development machines.

I was initially stymied by some errors while trying to sign-in. A quick reboot and restart of Visual Studio and the issues were resolved. Once logged in, your settings are associated to your Microsoft account and will follow you from one development machine to another.

Now I'm off to try out some of the other features and to see if the Code Review functionality performs as I'm hoping for. As an aside, I notice that the Team Explorer interface is much more refined.

Edit: Just a quick note that you will also need to update your version of the TFS Power Tools if you use them. They can be found here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f017b10c-02b4-4d6d-9845-58a06545627f