Datasheet

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).
Visual J# — This language was considered as a replacement for Visual J++. However,
this language had a Java syntax. It could build applications targeting only the .NET
Framework ’ s CLR. Now having a competing platform against Java, after replacing J++,
Microsoft no longer created any language running on the JVM.
The .NET Framework ’ s Base Class Library was established as a common infrastructure for
developers, thus making it easy and natural to solve common tasks such as using data access and
Web services. Visual Studio .NET provided a rich set of built - in tools to leverage the infrastructure
provided by the framework. The IDE was designed with extensibility in mind, and allowed
developers to integrate their own custom tools into the IDE.
A bit more than a year after Visual Studio.NET was released, a new version, Visual Studio .NET
2003, was shipped together with .NET Framework 1.1. Microsoft had a lot of work to do to
stabilize the framework, and, of course, dozens of critical bugs were fi xed. A few things (such as
the security model) were also changed, and new features were added to the framework (such
as built - in support for building mobile applications, IPv6 support, and built - in data access for
ODBC and Oracle databases). Also, the CLR became more stable from version 1.0 to 1.1.
Visual Studio.NET (the one released with .NET 1.0) was not able to compile applications for the
new CLR version, so the 2003 version had to undertake this task. Thanks to the robustness and
stability of Visual Studio .NET 2003, it became very popular, and is still in use because of the large
number of business applications developed for .NET 1.1.
VISUAL STUDIO 2005
Released in November 2005, Visual Studio 2005, together with .NET Framework 2.0,
brought fundamental changes to the tool, as well as to the languages. The Common Type
System (CTS) of the framework introduced generic types. This concept affected all languages,
because they must have been prepared to handle the feature of generics, and development
tools also needed to encapsulate support for this. The shift of CTS also touched ASP.NET
and ADO.NET.
Web application development had some pain in the former Visual Studio versions. Developers
had to install and use Internet Information Server (IIS) locally on their machines, and it meant
confrontation with system administrators who did not want to have IIS on desktops for security
reasons. Visual Studio 2005 installed a local development Web server on desktops and resolved
this particular situation.
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Visual Studio 2005
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