Visual Studio 2010 News

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 built on WPF

Yes, today Microsoft has confirmed this to the entire developer’s world: Visual Studio 2010 IDE will be based on the WPF platform!
This is a great news and a sign that WPF is now ready for business applications.
WPF will permit us also to easily customize parts of the UI.

Visual Studio 2010 gets a new WPF interface

Microsoft has announced that Version 2010 of the Visual Studio development environment will have an interface created in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). General manager Scott Guthrie made the announcement in his keynote speech on the second day of PDC 2008. Guthrie said that WPF would offer new ease of use and support for multiple monitors.

Guthrie also announced that the expandability of Visual Studio will be improved. A programmer interface will make the editors in Visual Studio 2010 completely customizable. Guthrie showed an example containing 200 lines of program code, which replaces the XML display of comments in a C# code file with a graphic display and shows additional relevant bugs from the Team Foundation Server directly in the code window. Guthrie pointed out that in future, Visual Studio extensions will be easier to distribute, since new components will only have to be copied into a particular directory. Registration will no longer be necessary. However, Microsoft does not plan to offer a customizable compiler until the follow-on version to Visual Studio 2010, according to Guthrie. C# architect Anders Heijlsberghe confirmed the news about the compiler the day before Guthrie’s speech.

For web developers, Guthrie announced that the Visual Web Developer in Visual Studio 2010 would contain additional features that would make JavaScript programming easier, support CSS2, and offer a new assistant for installing web applications which can handle various configurations as well as the distribution of associated SQL server databases.

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Visual Studio also will fully support IBM DB2, and Oracle.

It will have integrated support for developing Microsoft Silverlight applications

The Visual Studio 2010 code editor now highlights references; whenever a symbol is selected, all other usages of the symbol are highlighted. It also offers a Quick Search feature to incrementally search across all symbols in C++, C# and VB.NET projects. Quick Search supports substring matches and camelCase searches.^bThe Call Hierarchy feature allows the developer to see all the methods that are called from a current method as well as the methods that call the current one. IntelliSense in Visual Studio supports a consume-first mode, which can be opted-into by the developer. In this mode, IntelliSense will not auto-complete identifiers; this allows the developer to use undefined identifiers (like variable or method names) and define those later. Visual Studio 2010 can help in this also by automatically defining them, if it can infer their types from usage.

Visual Studio Team System 2010, codenamed Rosario is being positioned for application lifecycle management. It will include new modelling tools, including the Architecture Explorer that graphically displays the projects and classes and the relationships between them. It supports UML activity diagram, component diagram, (logical) class diagram, sequence diagram, and use case diagram. Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes Test Impact Analysis which provides hints on which test cases are impacted by modifications to the source code, without actually running the test cases. This speeds up testing by avoiding running unneeded test cases.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes a Historical Debugger. Unlike the current debugger, that records only the currently-active stack, the historical debugger records all events like prior function calls, method parameters, events, exceptions etc. This allows the code execution to be rewound in case a breakpoint wasn’t set where the error occurred. The historical debugger will cause the application to run slower than the current debugger, and will use more memory as additional data needs to be recorded. Microsoft allows configuration of how much data should be recorded, in effect allowing developers to balance speed of execution and resource usage. The Lab Management component of Visual Studio Team System 2010 uses virtualization to create a similar execution environment for testers and developers. The virtual machines are tagged with checkpoints which can later be investigated for issues, as well as to reproduce the issue. Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes the capability to record test runs, that capture the specific state of the operating environment as well as the precise steps used to run the test. These steps can then be played back to reproduce issues.

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Visual Studio 2010 Team System Beta 1 (web-installer)
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 1 (web-installer)
Visual Studio 2010 CTP