This is something I have been wanting to work on for a long, long time. I think that I finally have all the technical aspect sorted that will allow me to make this happen. Now it is just a matter of time, money and effort… ahh, for more rainy days 🙂

The “dashboard” is vaguely modelled on the VS2012 version with the Start and Recent items there to the left. I figure the “News Feeds” could be configurable and possibly for more than just RSS/Twitter type feeds but for now I think this is a good start.

Some of the ideas I have planned:

• Recent – Similar to the current start page, this would be a set of tabs Solutions/Dictionaries/Diagrams/Tables/Source Files. I will probably throw in an ALL as well as a Search feature.
• Wiki – probably a submenu with each item linking to an iframe on the right
• IDE Metrics – I think this one could be really cool. Stats like Number of IDE Opens, graphs over time, Exceptions, App open/closes, CPU usage over time, etc, etc. Eventually I would like to see this data pushed up to an analytics site with aggregated metrics from all users. Filters to show mine/all would be neat too. Ahh, so many cool and useless things could go here!
• Addins – View, Purchase and manage IDE addins directly from here. No more mucking around with menu items and I think this one could even progress into more of an AppStore if there is demand.

Oh, and these are just the things I am thinking of for the FREE version… Once this is out there and if the take up is good enough I have many ideas about how to add value to your IDE experience!!

I may be looking at funding this project via a kind of KickStarter campaign and I would be very interested to here any thoughts you might have on that as well as feature ideas etc. Leave a comment, send a message via the contact form, on skype or whatever works best.

-brahn