To enable developers to write code that can capture the increasing popularity of Cloud Computing, VS 2010 comes with support for Windows Azure (Cloud environment from Microsoft). Developers can now build, deploy, debug services and applications for Windows Azure using Windows Azure Tools for VS. You can download this tool from http://tinyurl.com/mgozgh.
To increase the overall computation power, processors are coming with multiple cores on a single die. To successfully harness the power of multi-core or many core systems, conventional sequential applications need to be redesigned. You need to break sequential application into modules to be processed on different cores which is very difficult.
To enable developers to build applications that can harness multi-core capability, VS 2010 comes with following features: Parallel pattern Library, native C++ libraries that use lambda function and align well with Standard Template Library (STL), Parallel Extension to .NET Framework, library based support for imperative data and task parallelism via the Task Parallel Library, support for declarative data parallelism via PLINQ, and work coordination and managing shared state via Coordination Data Structures, Concurrency Runtime, resource management of multi-core hardware and task scheduling, parallel debugging windows which will provide a view of tasks running in the application, and a graphical view of parallel call stacks, Parallel profiling views which will give developers an understanding of their application's core utilization, thread behavior and contention blocking, and thread execution pattern per core.
Microsoft SharePoint support is also provided in VS 2010. Developers can quickly create or update SharePoint elements, use Server explorer to browse SharePoint site and its content, and import existing SharePoint content using the WSP Importer.
Windows 7 development
VS 2010 comes with full library and header support for Windows 7. Updates are done to Microsoft Foundation Class Library to support Windows 7 user interface elements like Ribbon, live icons, search access, and multi-touch interface.
Office business app development
Using VS 2010, developers can build Office client application that span multiple versions of Office i.e. 32-bit or 64-bit. These application can now be deployed as a single package. Besides, development of Office application itself has become easier with designer support for building flexible UI in Windows Presentation Foundation or Fluent.
Test driven development support
VS2010 also comes with testing support with TDD tool. In this approach of development, a developer first writes unit tests based on the product specification, and then writes source code to make a test succeed. VS 2010 supports TDD by generating new types and members in your source code when you first reference them in your test cases, before they are defined.
F# support
F# is the functional programming language for .NET framework. This strongly typed language uses type inference. This means that data type need not be explicitly declared by programmers, instead they are declared by complier during compilation. F# takes best features of both imperative and declarative programming paradigms making it a language which both scientists and programmers can easily identify. VS 2010 comes with F# project template. Check out a sample implementation of this language, in another article, in this issue.
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In Visual Studio 2010, developers can build Office client apps that can span multiple versions. |
Using Visual Studio 2010, developers can create projects targeting different versions of .NET. Also, there are plenty of new features including F# Language. |
Other features
Besides writing code, understanding code is also important. VS 2010 comes with integrated features that help developers to undersatnd code effectively. Features like 'Document Map Margin' render graphical view of source file while 'Inline Call Hierachy' feature enables a developer to select an entity or method and see how the code calls inwards or outwards or passes the entity in and out of the code section.
Web development is also enhanced in this latest version of VS with next generation ASP.NET web tools to develop MVC (Model View Controller) based websites. VS 2010 is also the first version to natively support JQuery.
To simplify web site deployment, VS 2010 comes with 'One Click Deployment' which enables developers to identify components of a website that need to be deployed and handle the process of moving them from the development machine to the web server.