What’s New about Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated environment that simplifies the entire development lifecycle, from design to deployment. Work within a personalized environment, and target a growing number of platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint® and cloud applications that accelerate the coding process and allow you to use your existing skills. Developers and testers can work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that let you find and fix bugs quickly and easily and help ensure high-quality solutions.

Be creative with rich user experiences for Microsoft Windows®, Microsoft Office and the Web

Powerful design surfaces enable the creation of compelling rich user experiences for Windows, Office and Web applications. New drag-and-drop data binding to Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight® applications makes building Windows and Rich Internet Applications easier and faster than ever. You'll have built-in tools for Windows 7 development, including multi-touch and “ribbon” UI components.

Transfer your architecture from whiteboard to living assets

Create UML-based diagrams to describe use cases, dependencies, sequences, logical layers, and more.  Diagrams are stored in Team Foundation Server and can be generated from code to stay in sync with the evolving project and you can use architectural validation against diagrams at check-in to help ensure that the architectural vision and integrity is preserved.

Instant scalability, automatic management, and standards based platform to build a new class of applications

Visual Studio 2010 and Windows® Azure™ provide a runtime environment in the cloud with on-demand compute, storage, and automated systems management. Windows Azure allows you to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.  With Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure developers have choice and flexibility to achieve their vision on the Windows Azure Platform. You are not constrained to writing in only one programming language or just web applications.

A single, integrated environment makes it easy for the whole team to collaborate

No matter what development task you’re doing (modeling, coding, testing or debugging) you can do it all without leaving the Visual Studio 2010 environment. Integrated solutions lead to improved productivity, simpler development, and collaboration across the team.

Make your development simple by using your existing skills

Visual Studio 2010 features F#, a new fully supported .NET language that is familiar and intuitive to developers with a background in dynamic language-based programming.  New support for SharePoint development, including tooling for Web Parts, Lists, Workflows, and Events and more, help you bring great new customized collaboration tools.

Build on existing standards and frameworks

While Visual Studio 2010 includes an improved unit testing framework for testing components of an ASP.NET MVC application, common 3rd party or open-source frameworks can also be used directly from Visual Studio 2010.  Developers will benefit from improvements to the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX framework, core IntelliSense support for JavaScript, and the integration of the popular jQuery framework, an open-source library for interacting with the Document Object Model (DOM).

Developers can help make deployment simple

Move Web applications into a production environment with a single click. Visual Studio 2010 will transfer your code, IIS settings, and database schema under the covers.  The .NET Client Profile, a 28mb subset of the .NET Framework, helps you deploy client applications in a fraction of the time.  Click-once improvements to Microsoft Office customizations make deploying add-ins easier.

Spend less time debugging

Inline call hierarchy helps quickly trace a program’s execution flow without invoking the debugger. One click identifies the calls in and out of a method.  New IntelliTrace™ feature makes the “no-repro” discussion a thing of the past. It records the application’s execution history and guarantees that you can always reproduce the reported bug. Step back in your coding history to see the exact application state when the bug occurred.  Specialized debugger to track the tasks and threads in applications optimized for upcoming improvements in underlying hardware capabilities.

Expand your testing process to embrace manual testing

Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 brings business users, test generalists and others into the test process by providing a modern integrated toolset that simplifies manual testing and aids in the delivery of high quality solutions.  Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 provides a single tool to capture and update test requirements, automate navigation of manual tests and speed the fix and accept cycle.

Embrace the needs of every team member

Build quality into the lifecycle with integrated tools to help ensure architectural consistency, ease build hand-offs and detailed performance analysis.  Testers and project managers can drive efficiency throughout the project. With Visual Studio 2010 helping align the test effort with project needs through automated testing, test lab management, and test impact analysis, the process can be streamlined and more productive.

Integrated support for test-first development

Visual Studio 2010 is equipped with integrated unit testing which allows you to easily test portions of your code before you write the full application, and then allows you to automatically jump from the result to the location in your code.  Visual Studio 2010 will generate all the stub code necessary for your unit tests to compile and run under the covers.

With Visual Studio 2010 you can use prototyping, modeling, and visual design tools to bring your visions to life. Create and share what you imagine and build on the creative strengths of your team. Enjoy an integrated environment where developers can use existing skills to model, code, debug, test, and deploy a growing number of application types. Visual Studio helps simplify common tasks and helps developers explore the depth of the platform. By providing powerful tools for managing a project, maintaining source code and finding bugs, testers and developers can use manual and automated testing, and advanced debugging tools to help ensure they are building the right application, the right way.

Download the trial version here today.