Updates for Visual Studio 2010
If Visual Studio 2010 is your primary tool and you have an MSDN subscription, today was a great day! If you’re a Visual Studio 2010 developer but don’t have an MSDN subscription, Thursday, March 10 will be a great day for you! Why is today (or Thursday) a great day? Simple. Today (or Thursday) is the day when some really cool updates and enhancements are released for Visual Studio 2010 delivering on Microsoft’s commitment to us, developers, to provide innovative tools and high quality software solutions that meet our diverse needs and organizations.
So what are these updates? Here’s the scoop:
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1
In continuing the momentum focused on improving the developer experience, Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 adds some of the most requested customer features to Visual Studio 2010, including better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit solutions and SharePoint, unit testing support on .NET 3.5, and a new performance wizard for Silverlight. Many fixes went in as well, of which a full list can be viewed in the Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server knowledge base articles. Additional information about SP1 compatibility, SP1 Readme, and other general information about SP1 can be found in the Visual Studio Dev Center.
Next Steps for Visual Studio Service Pack 1
If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from your subscriber downloads.
If you don’t have an MSDN subscription, no worries, it will just be a little bit longer of a wait. On Thursday March 10, you’ll be able to download Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from here.
Visual Studio Load Test Feature Pack
Often time load and performance testing is done too late in the application lifecycle and fixing these types of defects at that time is costly. What’s the solution? Performance testing integrated into the application lifecycle at an early stage. With the Visual Studio 2010 Load Testing Feature Pack available for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with an MSDN license, you can now load test your applications with as many virtual users as you deem appropriate to realistically simulate load. This will go a long way to ensuring that your solution will be able to cope with real-world demands and will behave in a predictable manner. Using these testing tools throughout the application lifecycle will ensure that you’ll be able to locate problems before they become too costly to fix.
Next Steps for Getting Started with the Visual Studio Load Test Feature Pack
- Dive into more detailed information about the Load Test Feature Pack at the Visual Studio Team Test blog.
- Check out the FAQs: Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack and Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 FAQ
- Download Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from your MSDN Subscriber Download Center to enable the Load Test Feature Pack.
- Read more about performance and stress testing throughout the application lifecycle.
Over the next couple of weeks, the Canadian Solution Developers’ blog will be doing a deep dive on testing and application lifecycle management as part of a series entitled “Bridging the Gap Between Developers and Testers Using Visual Studio 2010” with two Canadian ALM experts and MVPs, Etienne Tremblay and Vincent Grondin. You may also want to look into and attend the AlignIT tour where these topics will be discussed in an in-person live event and online simulcast.