VS2010: Overview

Visual Studio 2010 brings you features and tools that really will set your ideas free.

HardCopy Issue: 52 | Found In: Visual Studio 2010 | Published: 19/05/2011 | Last Revision: 29/06/2011

In the 14 years since Visual Studio first appeared, Windows development has been transformed. There are new platforms in Silverlight, ASP.NET and Ajax. Desktop applications can take advantage of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), there are facilities for targeting the new Windows Phone platform, and it is even possible to put your application in the ‘Cloud’ thanks to Windows Azure. Visual Studio has evolved to take advantage of these new platforms, and to support new languages. It has also extended its reach by offering tools not only to write code, but to assist in design, testing and even deployment. And then there are the new tools and frameworks to help you make the most of the potential offered by the latest multi-core processors. Over the next 34 pages, Tim Anderson will be looking in depth at the main areas in which Visual Studio 2010 has something new to offer, and finding out what third-party suppliers are doing to support it. We will also be looking at your licensing and upgrading options. Right from the moment you first open Visual Studio 2010, it is obvious that much has changed as Microsoft has taken the opportunity to re-build the user interface around WPF 4.0. New features include the ability to float tools outside the main window, allowing you to make better use of wide or multiple screen displays, and a completely new help system which can derive content either locally or from MSDN Online. Microsoft has taken the opportunity to introduce .NET 4.0 alongside Visual Studio 2010. As Tim explains, this is a major update, introducing new libraries and support for new languages. In particular there is a new library to support parallel programming which is used by other .NET libraries to improve performance on multi-core processors. Visual Basic and C# benefit from new dynamic features, and there is a new functional language in F#. There are also enhancements to Windows Workflow (WF) which open up new possibilities for application design. Moving on to the construction of Web applications, Visual Studio 2010 offers many enhancements. In particular (and unsurprisingly), it is designed to help you take full advantage of the new features offered by Silverlight 4.0, with its support for COM Automation, printing and extended range of controls. Silverlight projects are supported out-of-the-box. In addition to ASP.NET and Ajax, Visual Studio 2010 introduces a new framework in the form of ASP.NET MVC which offers several advantages, particularly when it comes to testing and performance.

IntelliTrace, which comes with the Ultimate Edition, lets you examine application state both before and after the point at which a bug occurred.

Sticking with the Internet, Visual Studio 2010 introduces support for Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s platform for the deployment of applications ‘in the Cloud’, together with a hosted version of SQL Server called SQL Azure. Working with Azure is made easier through the provision of what amounts to a local version against which you can develop and test prior to deployment. Another important platform is Microsoft Office, and here again Visual Studio 2010 makes life easier. SharePoint applications are much easier to debug, and there are several new SharePoint project types. With regards to Microsoft Office, the new dynamic language features make for a better fit with the Office COM API, and there is a new visual designer for the Office Ribbon. Finally, of course, there are the application lifecycle tools. All three editions, including Professional, come with unit testing tools. There is also Team Foundation Server Basic, which can be run on the same machine as Visual Studio itself. The Premium edition comes with a wider range of testing and profiling tools, while the Ultimate edition adds advanced tools for design and modelling, with full support for UML 2, together with Test and Lab Manager which supports testing on virtual machines. It also include IntelliTrace, which uses a trace log so that you can back-track through application state. In March, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 which, in addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, introduced a number of new features. These include a new Help Viewer, a XAML Editor/Designer, and support for Internet Information Services (IIS) Express and SQL Server Compact which make it easier to test and deploy Web applications. Even in these 42 pages we can only scratch the surface of what Visual Studio 2010 has to offer. However there is plenty here to ‘set your ideas free’.