DevTopics » Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Released Today

timm — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:26:03 +0000

Microsoft is releasing Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, and Silverlight 4 at the Visual Studio Developer Conference in Las Vegas. VS 2010 and .NET 4 are available today, and Silverlight 4 will be available to download later this week.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 comes in four flavors: Pro, Premium, Ultimate and Test Pro. There are many new features including:

Improved IDE with tear-away pages and multi-monitor support
Search as you type
Call hierarchy to see who calls what
IntelliSense suggestion mode
IntelliTrace Tivo-like debugging
Extension manager
Generate from Usage: use classes/members before defining them
Live semantic errors (those colored squiggly lines)

Visual Studio 2010 Home Page
VS 2010 Product Highlights
What’s New in VS 2010
10 Cool Things About VS 2010

C# and Visual Basic

The main .NET languages C# and Visual Basic both saw significant improvements and new features including:

Dynamic type and dynamic dispatch
Named parameters and optional parameters
Optional arguments and indexed properties
Covariance and contravariance
Statement lambdas
Highlight all references of a symbol
Implicit line continuations
Office Automation APIs
Auto-implemented properties

What’s New in Visual C# 2010
What’s New in Visual Basic 2010

.NET Framework 4

.NET Framework 4.0 is a major upgrade with many new features including:

Support for the new language features mentioned above
Support for IronPython, IronRuby, F# and M programming languages
Oslo modelling platform
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic types and complex numbers
Parallel Extensions for multi-core and distributed systems

.NET Framework Home Page
What’s New in .NET 4
.NET 4 Code Examples

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate

timm — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:35:03 +0000

The Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is now available to the public. The biggest change from Beta 2 is a major improvement to Visual Studio performance, specifically as it relates to loading solutions, typing, building and debugging. The RC includes a “go-live license” for companies that wish to deploy Visual Studio 2010 in their production environment.

Download VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 RC

Visual Studio Myth Buster

timm — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:32:06 +0000

Do you need help convincing your boss that your company needs to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010? Or perhaps you are looking for additional ammo in your .NET vs. Java religious wars with your programming colleagues?

Microsoft has produced a Silverlight-based “Myth Busting Matrix” for Visual Studio. This nifty web tool details the benefits of upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 and helps dispel some widely-held myths about Visual Studio and the Microsoft .NET Framework. You can browse all three supported versions of Visual Studio (2005, 2008 and 2010) by your areas of interest and click on the myths for more information.

Visual Studio Myth Buster

Visual Studio 2010 Tip of the Day

timm — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:22:14 +0000

Zain Naboulsi, a Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, has started the “Tip of the Day” series for Visual Studio 2010, taking the reins from Sara Ford.

Visual Studio 2010 Tip of the Day

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2

timm — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:13:26 +0000

The second beta version of Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework v4.0 are now available. VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 deliver significant new capabilities and improvements. The Beta 2 release was focused on performance, stability, and the integration of the overall feature set. The development team is awaiting our feedback on the product and preparing for the final release candidate (RC). Beta 2 includes a “go-live” license, which means you can start using these tools for your production projects.

VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 are slated to be released on March 22, 2010.

Download VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2
More details about Beta 2 from Scott Gu

Visual Studio Shell

timm — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:45:15 +0000

If you create software development tools, you’ll want to consider building on the Visual Studio Shell. A streamlined Visual Studio development environment, the Visual Studio Shell provides the core foundation so you can focus on building your application’s unique features. Flexible customization options help you deliver optimized experiences for specific markets. Note that the Visual Studio Shell is royalty-free for building and deploying applications.

The key benefits of the Visual Studio Shell:

Faster development. The Visual Studio Shell accelerates development by providing a base integrated development environment that can host custom tools and programming languages.
A familiar environment. Developers can build on the Visual Studio platform and provide end users a familiar user interface, speeding the learning curve for both.
Optimized for languages and tools. Created in response to requests from our partners, the Visual Studio Shell gives you the option of integrating your tools with Visual Studio or creating an isolated, custom-branded application.

Visual Studio Shell

Documentation Available for .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010

timm — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:02:48 +0000

Documentation for the next generation of the Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now publicly available at MSDN.

Visual Studio 2010 Docs
.NET Framework 4 Docs
WPF Docs

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Now Available for MSDN Subscribers

timm — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:48:11 +0000

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for MSDN Subscribers. Visual Studio 2010 is a complete suite of tools for building both desktop and team-based enterprise Web applications. In addition to building high-performing desktop applications, you can use Visual Studio’s powerful component-based development tools and other technologies to simplify team-based design, development, and deployment of enterprise solutions.

Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights
MSDN Subscribers Download

More .NET News

Visual Studio 2010 Concept IDE

timm — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:59:25 +0000

Tom Ollar and Jim Bennett have developed a very interesting prototype for a next-generation version of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. They present 20 new concepts ranging from the inherently useful (visual stack) to the somewhat silly (remoting eye, an eyeball that indicates your programming partner is connected to the session).

One interesting concept is the “mini,” shown in the photo at left. Before you say “not another diagramming standard!” note that the “mini” DebugDiagrammer is pluggable and can be replaced with UML or your own custom diagrammer. The intent is to visualize objects, not classes. The “mini” acts as a thumbnail showing the working internals of an object.

I’m a sucker for next-generation user interfaces. I love watching movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Minority Report to ogle their futuristic UIs. But I believe that future interfaces will be more simple and less cluttered, similar to what we’re seeing emerge on the iPhone. The days of “command smorgasbords” — layers upon layers of menus, toolbars and panels — will eventually give way to simple, malleable interfaces that provide just the information and controls you need at any one time to perform your task.

Read the Code Project article and download a prototype

Microsoft Sues to Defend Visual Studio Users

timm — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:05:36 +0000

This is scary, folks. If you use Microsoft Visual Studio to create web services, you could be subject to lawsuits for patent infringement. Yes, simply using a software program puts your company and livelihood at legal risk, yet another sign of how terribly flawed is the U.S. software patent system.

Fortunately, Microsoft is coming to save the day. Microsoft filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week to defend users of its Visual Studio development tools. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate several patents that WebXchange is using to sue three large companies: Allstate Insurance, Dell computer and FedEx.

WebXchange is an online transaction services provider based in Menlo Park, California. The WebXchange lawsuits claim the online services offered by the three companies violate its patents. For example, WebXchange alleges FedEx infringes three patents in an online system FedEx launched four years ago that enables customers to send print jobs to its Kinko’s stores.

Microsoft is not named in any of the WebXchange lawsuits. In its suit, Microsoft asks the court to declare WebXchange’s patents invalid because they are overly broad and clearly based on existing technologies. These are common symptoms of bad software patents, of which there are way too many these days. Microsoft has attempted to negotiate with WebXchange, but WebXchange has refused to talk and has instead chosen to fight in court.

Allstate, Dell and FedEx have all sought indemnification from Microsoft. Most large software vendors indemnify their customers and accept responsibility for patent infringement and other legal problems caused by use of their products. It’s great to see Microsoft step up to the plate to fight bad software patents.

More at ComputerWorld