VISUAL STUDIO 2010

Visual Studio 2010, codenamed "Hawaii", is under development. [A CTP version of is publicly available as a pre-installed Virtual Hard Disk containing Windows Server 2008 as the OS.]

The Visual Studio 2010 IDE has been redesigned which, according to Microsoft, clears the UI organization and "reduces clutter and complexity". The new IDE better supports multiple document windows and floating tool windows, while offering better multi-monitor support. The IDE shell has been rewritten in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF); where as the internals have been redesigned using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) that offers more extensibility points than previous versions of the IDE that enabled add-ins to modify the behavior of the IDE. The new multi-paradigm programming language ML-variant F# programming language will be a part of Visual Studio 2010; as will be the M, the textual modelling language, and Quadrant, the visual model designer, which are a part of the Oslo initiative.

Visual Studio 2010 will come with .NET Framework 4.0 and will support developing applications targeting Windows 7. It will support IBM DB2 and Oracle databases out of the box, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. It will have integrated support for developing Microsoft Silverlight applications, including an interactive designer. Visual Studio 2010 will offer several tools to make parallel programming simpler. In addition to the Parallel Extensions for .NET Framework and the Parallel Patterns Library for native code, Visual Studio 2010 includes tools for debugging parallel applications. The new tools lets parallel Tasks and their runtime stacks to be visualized. Tools for profiling parallel applications can be used for visualization of thread wait times and thread migrations across processor cores.

The Visual Studio 2010 code editor now highlights references; whenever a symbol is selected, all other usages of the symbol are highlighted. It also offers a Quick Search feature to incrementally search across all symbols in C++, C# and VB.NET projects. Quick Search supports substring matches and camelCase searches. The Call Hierarchy feature allows the developer to see all the methods that are called from a current method as well as the methods that call the current one. IntelliSense in Visual Studio supports a consume-first mode, which can be opted-into by the developer. In this mode, IntelliSense will not auto-complete identifiers; this allows the developer to use undefined identifiers (like variable or method names) and define those later. Visual Studio 2010 can help in this also by automatically defining them, if it can infer their types from usage.

Visual Studio Team System 2010, codenamed Rosario is being positioned for Application lifecycle management. It will include new modelling tools, including the Architecture Explorer that graphically displays the projects and classes and the relationships between them. It supports UML activity diagram, component diagram, (logical) class diagram, sequence diagram, and use case diagram. Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes Test Impact Analysis which provides hints on which test cases are impacted by modifications to the source code, without actually running the test cases. This speeds up testing by avoiding running unneeded test cases.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes a Historical Debugger. Unlike the current debugger, that records only the currently-active stack, the historical debugger records all events like prior function calls, method parameters, events, exceptions etc. This allows the code execution to be rewound in case a breakpoint wasn't set where the error occurred. The historical debugger will cause the application to run slower than the current debugger, and will use more memory as additional data needs to be recorded. Microsoft allows configuration of how much data should be recorded, in effect allowing developers to balance speed of execution and resource usage. The Lab Management component of Visual Studio Team System 2010 uses virtualization to create a similar execution environment for testers and developers. The virtual machines are tagged with checkpoints which can later be investigated for issues, as well as to reproduce the issue. Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes the capability to record test runs, that capture the specific state of the operating environment as well as the precise steps used to run the test. These steps can then be played back to reproduce issues

- from wikipedia