Visual Studio 2010 Eases Web, Cloud Development

When Visual Studio 2008 came out last November, it was packed with a lot new functionality and features that made many a Microsoft developer's heart go a flutter. This month, Microsoft unveiled the future of Visual Studio and it's called Visual Studio 2010. To along with the new version, the .Net framework is being upgraded to version 4. There are tons of new improvements expected, along with a rumor that SharePoint development will get much easier. We took a peek at the changes coming and wanted to fill you in. Microsoft has focused the improvements to Visual Studio 2010 around a few focus areas: Enabling Emerging Trends, Inspiring Developer Delight, Riding the Next Generation Platform Wave and Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management.

Enabling Emerging Trends

* Cloud Development: Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio enables developers to build, debug and deploy services and applications for the cloud. This includes a project model that you can use to build your application or service. The Windows Azure Tools are used to deploy the package to the cloud through the Live Developer Portal. * Parallel Development It's not easy by any means to write code that is optimized to run across more than one processor (parallel development). Microsoft now provides an environment that will help do this through Visual Studio IDE support for Parallel development and Native C++ libraries and compiler support for parallel applications. In addition, version 4 of the .net framework will also provide things like P-LIINQ and parallel language semantics and framework components. The debugger and a performance analyzer are also optimized to support parallel development.

Inspiring Developer Delight

* Coding Improvements: A new editor uses Windows Presentation Foundation technology to provide integrated support that helps you understand your code. Things like the "Document Map Margin” -- which renders a graphical view of your source file with information about the code, third party add-ons for custom views, “Inline Call Hierarchy” -- see how a particular method or entity is passed into and out of the code section, and "Highlight References" -- a visual representation of code references.
The new editor also integrates with something called the TDD -- Test Driver Development. The TDD is used to build the tests to test the code before it's even written. * Web Development: A new set of ASP.Net tools allows developers to use TDD to build Model-View-Controller (MVC) based websites. Included are Project Templates and Solutions out of the box for a MVC website, automatic generation of test projects, wizards for common tasks such as creating views from controllers and more. Support for Javascript and JQuery, a "one click" deployment wizard and Silverlight 2 runtime and tooling are also new. * C++ Development: A total revamp of the IDE to support parallel development, cloud development, an MFC Class Wizard and stronger support for large solutions with thousands of files are in the new version of VS.

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint were demonstrated at TechEd EMEA Developers 2008. The tools added include: * View lists and other artifacts from SharePoint in Visual Studio * New SharePoint Services Project file * Visual Web Part Designer, web part project items * Event Receivers for SharePoint, Wizards to select the event receiver * ASPX Workflow Initiation form for Workflow Project * SharePoint packaging explorer and editor

Riding the Next Generation Platform Wave

* Windows 7: VS2010 will support development for the new Windows 7 operating system which includes a number of new tools to develop new apps and make existing ones take advantage of the new features of the OS. * Office Business Applications: First introduced with VS2005, the next version of VS will enable developers to build Office applications that span multiple versions of MS Office (32 or 64 bit) and deliver them as a single deployment package (again using that One Click Wizard we mentioned above). In addition, we see the introduction of designer support for building flexible UIs in either WPF or Fluent, improved data binding, integration of Office data sources using LINQ and integration of the Business Data Catalog.

Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management

The primary discussion around this new version is about the "democratizing of application life-cycle management (ALM)" using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 -- also called Rosario.

Architecture Lifecycle Diagram

* Modeling Tools: Using VSTS 2010 Architecture, both technical and non-technical users can work together to model business systems using either UML and DSL -- this modeling capability is part of the Oslo modeling platform. * Improved Efficiency Throughout the Test Cycle: New and improved testing features include the ability to eliminate non-reproducible bugs, fast setup and deployment of tests and the ability to ensure all code changes are tested. * Improvements in Collaboration Capabilities: Team Foundation Server has been enhanced, enabling development teams to utilize agile development approaches, visualization tools for tracking changes and workflow-build tools that catch errors before the real trouble comes

Architecture Explorer

Visual Studio 2010 also provides a unified VSTS Development and Database product.

Getting to Visual Studio 2010

It's not out yet. You can try it out with the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview. The CTP release is available in English only as a Virtual PC image. Apparently the plan is to roll VS 2010 in five phases, broken down similar to how they are described above and starting with Democrating Application Lifecycle Management. In an interview with Information Week, Dave Mendlen, the company's director of marketing for developer tools said "Instead of gradually opening a fire hose of news, with this release we'll focus on individual themes," [] "While transparency is a good thing in many circumstances, the perception [among developers] was that they were getting bombarded with information sort of constantly." And while we've heard this new version makes developing SharePoint applications much easier, we couldn't find any details on the Microsoft sites on how they'll make that happen -- other than the MSDN blog referenced above. You can get a little more information on Visual Studio 2010 on the product website or view some videos describing it on Microsoft's Channel 9 PDC2008 site.