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CHAPTER 1 VISUAL STUDIO 2010
it later for advanced topics that you glossed over your fi rst time through. Visual Studio is a powerful and, at
times, complex tool and you aren ’ t expected to master it on your fi rst read through this chapter.
When Visual Studio 2005 was released, Microsoft expanded on the different versions of Visual Studio
available for use. At the low - cost end, and currently free, is Visual Basic Express Edition. This tool enables
you to build desktop applications with Visual Basic only. Its companion for Web development is Visual Web
Developer Express, which enables you to build ASP.NET applications. At the high end, Microsoft offers
Visual Studio Ultimate. Each of the high - end, Professional, Premium, and Ultimate editions is available as
part of an MSDN subscription and each of these editions further extends the core Visual Studio 2010
capabilities beyond the core Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to help improve design, testing, and
collaboration between developers.
Of course, the focus of this chapter is how Visual Studio enables you to use Visual Basic to build
applications geared toward “ better, faster, cheaper ” business goals. To this end, we ’ ll be examining features
of Visual Studio starting with those in the core Visual Basic 2010 Express Edition and building up to the
full Visual Studio Team Suite.
This chapter provides an overview of many of the capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. It also provides a
brief introduction to the features available by using one of the more feature - rich versions of Visual Studio.
Experienced developers will probably gloss over much of this information although I encourage them
to review the new historical debugging features available in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate covered in this
chapter. The goal is to demonstrate how Visual Studio makes you, as a developer, more productive and
successful.
VISUAL STUDIO 2010: EXPRESS THROUGH ULTIMATE
For those who aren ’ t familiar with the main elements of .NET development there is the common language
runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework, the various language compilers and Visual Studio. Each of these plays
a role, for example the CLR — covered in Chapter 4 — manages the execution of code on the .NET platform.
Thus code can be targeted to run on a specifi c version of this runtime environment.
The .NET Framework provides a series of classes that developers leverage across implementation languages.
This framework or Class Library is versioned and targeted to run on a specifi c minimum version of the CLR.
It is this library along with the language compilers that are referenced by Visual Studio. Visual Studio
allows you to build applications that target one or more of the versions of what is generically called .NET.
In some cases the CLR and the .NET Framework will be the same; for example, .NET Framework version 1.0
ran on CLR version 1.0. In other cases just as Visual Basic ’ s compiler is on version 10, the .NET Framework
might have a newer version targeting an older version of the CLR.
The same concepts carry into Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2003 was focused on .NET 1.1, while the
earlier Visual Studio .NET (2002) was focused on .NET 1.0. Originally, each version of Visual Studio was
optimized for a particular version of .NET. Similarly, Visual Studio 2005 was optimized for .NET 2.0,
but then along came the exception of the .NET Framework version 3.0. This introduced a new Framework,
which was supported by the same version 2.0 of the CLR, but which didn ’ t ship with a new version of
Visual Studio.
Fortunately, Microsoft chose to keep Visual Basic and ASP.NET unchanged for the .NET 3.0 Framework
release. However, when you looked at the.NET 3.0 Framework elements, such as Windows Presentation
Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Workfl ow Foundation, you found that
those items needed to be addressed outside of Visual Studio. Thus, while Visual Studio is separate from
Visual Basic, the CLR and .NET development, in practical terms Visual Studio was tightly coupled to each
of these items.
With Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft loosened this coupling by providing robust support that allowed the
developer to target any of three different versions of the .NET Framework. Visual Studio 2010 continues
this, enabling you to target an application to run on .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0,.NET 3.5, or .NET 4.
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