Microsoft Corporation just released its most famous IDE tool for developers, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 on May 20, 2009 for MSDN Subscribers and soon released another version to public. A CTP version of VS 2010 was released on 2008 in VHD format. Visual Studio 2010 was introduced by codename Hawaii.

Actually, I didn’t try to test VS 2010 on VHD since a runtime installation would work fine for me to debug errors during installation and working environments.

I’ve just installed Visual Studio 2010 (2 hours ago from posting this article) and here is the first impression.

First Look

As shown in figure, the Visual Studio 2010 IDE was redesigned for clear UI organization with support of multiple document windows and floating tools windows. The new that the IDE shell was rewritten on WPF “Windows Presentation Foundation”, Microsoft’s revolutions in graphics experiences was firstly introduced in .NET Framework 3.0, whereas the internals were redesigned using MEF “Managed Extensibility Framework” to allow rich add of add-ins.

New Technologies

.NET Framework 4.0

Microsoft announced the .NET Framework 4.0 on 29 September 2008. Public beta was released with Visual Studio 2010 on May 26. The new .NET Framework empowers the Azure cloud computing platform programmability by support of: Parallel Extensions, PLINQ, Task Parallel Library. It also provides full support for F#, IronRuby and IronPython languages. It also provides supporting the subset of .NET Framework and ASP.NET with Server Core as in Windows Server 2008 R2. Beside lots of enhancements on existing .NET technologies.

F#

Full support of the multi-paradigm programming language F# which was included into the new version of .NET Framework 4.0. F# would be a replacement of J# that was no more included since Visual Studio 2008 as a sign that Microsoft will no more provide support for JAVA programming language. F# was developed in Microsoft Research Labs and firstly appeared in 2002 and it’s a language that provide rich support for both functional, imperative and object oriented programming aspects.

Oracle Database Programmability Support

Since Visual Studio 2010 provides extensibility and providing rich support for adding add-ins for third parties, Quest announced that they will provide an add-in that provide Oracle Database programmability support within Visual Studio 2010.

The new tool enables Oracle developers to perform offline design, development and change management in VSTS, and integrate their changes into the application's automated build schedule. This capability ensures that all database changes are managed and tracked in the system, unifying Oracle professionals with the rest of their organization's VSTS team.

"We are pleased to have Quest Software supporting Visual Studio Team System 2010," Jason Zander, general manager of Microsoft's Visual Studio Developer Division, said in the statement. "With this forthcoming solution, Oracle developers will be able to take full advantage of the benefits of Visual Studio Team System."

Code Editor

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 2010 Team System

Visual Studio Team System 2010, codenamed Rosario is being positioned for application lifecycle management. It will include new modeling 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.

I’m going to display a list of backdraws and bugs found in this release of Visual Studio in a later article.