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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.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is available in Visual Studio. You can follow the Consume -

First - Declare - Later approach during code writing.

The code editing experience has been signiﬁ cantly enhanced:

Visual Studio now understands your code, provides you with Call Hierarchy, and

highlights references.

With the Quick Search function, you can easily navigate within your code — not

just in the current code ﬁ le but in the entire solution.

IntelliSense has been improved. It now has substring matching, helping you when

you do not remember exact member names.

The new code editor is extensible, and creating extensions has been signiﬁ cantly

simpliﬁ ed.

Online Visual Studio Gallery is integrated directly into Visual Studio. With the Extension

Manager, you can browse online content (tools, controls, and templates) and immediately

install third - party extensions.

You are not obliged to create new projects from the templates already installed on your

machine. You can create your project right from online project templates with the New

Project dialog.

Multi - core and multi - threaded applications are now ﬁ rst - class citizens in Visual Studio. You

can debug your applications with their nature of using multiple parallel tasks and threads.

The new tools and views allow you to look for and focus on those details (race conditions,

blockings, interoperation, and so on) that were invisible in previous versions.

Modeling, designing, and validating architecture now are organic parts of Visual Studio.

Not only can architects beneﬁ t from these features, but those can be used for communica-

tion among team members or with customers.

Shift to WPF

Maybe it sounds weird, but the majority of Visual Studio ’ s code base is unmanaged code — large

pieces of this code come from the COM era, and did not really change over time. With Visual

Studio 2010, the development team undertook the challenge of a technology shift: the UI technology

of the shell and a major part of the IDE was changed from GDI/GDI+ to WPF — that is, a

managed technology. The new design of the product (the new splash screen is shown in Figure 1 - 4)

communicates this new approach.

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