Visual Studio 2010

On April 12, 2010, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010, codenamed Dev10, and .NET Framework 4.Visual Studio 2010 features a new UI developed using WPF

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 using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), whereas 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. However, the ability to customize the layout, content and position of toolbars and menus is limited in Visual Studio 2010.

The new multi-paradigm programming language ML-variant F# forms part of Visual Studio 2010; as do M, the textual modeling language, and Quadrant, the visual model designer, which are a part of the Oslo initiative.

Visual Studio 2010 comes with .NET Framework 4 and supports developing applications targeting Windows 7. It supports IBM DB2 and Oracle databases, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. It has integrated support for developing Microsoft Silverlight applications, including an interactive designer.Visual Studio 2010 offers several tools to make parallel programming simpler: in addition to the Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework and the Parallel Patterns Library for native code, Visual Studio 2010 includes tools for debugging parallel applications. The new tools allow the visualization of parallel Tasks and their runtime stacks. Tools for profiling parallel applications can be used for visualization of thread wait-times and thread migrations across processor cores. Intel and Microsoft have jointly pledged support for a new Concurrency Runtime in Visual Studio 2010 and Intel has launched parallelism support in Parallel Studio as an add-on for Visual Studio.

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 developers can opt into. 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 also help in this by automatically defining them, if it can infer their types from usage.

Visual Studio 2010 features a new Help System replacing the MSDN Library viewer. The Help System is no longer based on Microsoft Help 2 and does not use Microsoft Document Explorer. Dynamic help containing links to related help topics based on where the developer was in the IDE has been removed in the shipping product, but can be added back using a download from Microsoft.
Visual Studio 2010 no longer supports development for Windows Mobile prior to Windows Phone 7.

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