PART I TE CHAPTER 1: History of Visual Studio RI AL Visual Studio MA CHAPTER 2: Visual Studio UI Enhancements CHAPTER 3: Visual Studio Code Snippets TE D CHAPTER 4: Visual Studio Templates GH CHAPTER 5: Getting the Most Out of the IDE CO PY RI CHAPTER 6: Visual Studio Extensibility
1 History of Visual Studio Although this book is dedicated to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, having a good historical background in Visual Studio can help you better understand the features treated in the subsequent chapters. Regardless of whether you are old friends with Visual Studio or it is new for you, it is always worth knowing where it started and how it’s been evolving. The roots of Visual Studio go back for almost 19 years, back to the point somewhere between the release of Windows 3.
❘ CHAPTER 1 HISTORY OF VISUAL STUDIO ROOTS For a long time, Windows development was a field where only C and C++ programmers could play. They had to carry out a lot of tasks for creating the simplest user interface — such as defining and registering Windows classes, implementing the Windows message loop, dispatching Windows messages, painting the client in Windows, and so on.
Visual Studio.NET 2002 and 2003 ❘ 5 Having so many separate languages and tools, the architect teams recognized that the whole visual aspect could be separated from the languages. Why create separate IDEs for all the languages and tools if they could fit into the same environment? That was when the idea of Visual Studio was born. Visual Studio 97 and 6.0 In 1997, Microsoft built a single environment to integrate multiple languages into one application surface.
❘ CHAPTER 1 HISTORY OF VISUAL STUDIO and a half, but, in February 2002, .NET Framework 1.0 was released as part of a pair with Visual Studio.NET (the latter of which is often referred as Visual Studio .NET 2002). Visual Studio.NET had an IDE that fi nally integrated the tools and languages into the same environment. Because (except for Visual C++) all the languages were new (even Visual Basic .
Visual Studio 2005 ➤ Visual C++ — With the ascension of .NET, there were still many software development areas with native (Win32 API) Windows development rules (for example, device driver implementation). Visual C++ provided this capability. Besides, Visual C++ was able to interoperate with managed code, and additional grammatical and syntactic extensions (Managed Extensions for C++) allowed compiling code targeting the .NET Common Language Run-time (CLR).
❘ CHAPTER 1 HISTORY OF VISUAL STUDIO With this release, Microsoft widened the camp of programmers using Visual Studio with two new editions: ➤ Express Editions — These editions (they are free) targeted students, hobbyists, and other developers coding for fun.
Visual Studio 2008 ❘ 9 mix projects with different targets in their solutions. Because one native Win32 process could host only one CLR at the same time, .NET 1.1 (because it uses CLR 1.1) was not in the list of available targets. Both Visual Basic and C# went through fundamental changes to support the new LINQ syntax. As an addition, Visual Basic 9.0 was given support for XML literals (including plain XML text in the source code); C# 3.0 was extended with new initializer syntax.
❘ CHAPTER 1 HISTORY OF VISUAL STUDIO ➤ ADO.NET Data Services — This is fi rst- class infrastructure for developing dynamic Internet components by enabling data to be exposed as REST-based data services. ➤ ASP.NET Dynamic Data — This provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid data driven development without writing any code. Visual Studio 2008 did not change the structure of editions in version 2005.
Visual Studio 2010 ❘ 11 will be able to choose from three main version (of course, free Express editions are still available): ➤ Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN — This version is intended to be the essential tool for basic development tasks to assist developers in easily implementing their ideas. ➤ Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN — This provides a complete toolset to help developers deliver scalable, high-quality applications.
❘ CHAPTER 1 HISTORY OF VISUAL STUDIO What’s New in Visual Studio 2010 Addressing what is new in Visual Studio is not tackled here in its entirety. Each chapter of this book contains sections dedicated to this topic. Moreover, many chapters are especially about treating Visual Studio new features with all nitty-gritty details. Without the need of completeness, here is a short list to whet your appetite: ➤ Cloud development (Windows Azure) and SharePoint development is now supported.
Summary ❘ 13 FIGURE 1 -4: The splash screen reflects the brand new design of Visual Studio 2010 The formerly angular and multi- colored “infi nity sign” logo became a round- cornered and gradually- colored one, emphasizing the smooth integration among the tools within the IDE.
