Visual Studio 2010 was released by Microsoft on 12^th April 2010. It was released under the code names. NETFramework4 and Dev10. According to Microsoft, Visual Studio 2010 has been revamped to be less cluttered and complex than its previous version. The new IDE release is packed with several features that facilitate productive programming. Floating tool windows, multiple document windows, improved code Intellisense are some of the noteworthy introductions/improvisations. 

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) have been respectively used to redesign the IDE shell and the internals. Visual Studio 2010 also gets a whole new multi-paradigm ML-variant. The code editor is also improved to highlight all symbol usages when a specific symbol in the code is selected.

The CallHierachy feature enables users to trace all the methods that are called from a specific method as well as all the methods that take calls from the current one. The MSDN Library viewers is replaced with a Help System containing Dynamic Links to help topics.

Visual Studio Ultimate 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 will replace Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite. Ultimate 2010 will be available with new modelling tools including Architecture Explorer, Test Impact Analysis, Historical Debugger, IntelliTrace and several additional features.

Architecture Explorer will provide graphical display of classes and projects and their interrelationships. It will also support component diagrams, UMP activity program, sequence diagram, use case diagram and logical class diagram.

Test Impact Analysis will increase the speed of running test cases by eliminating unnecessary test cases that do not add value. It will provide hints to the developer as to which test cases will be impacted due to modifications made to source code.

New features introduced in Visual Studio 2010

Improved Code Intellisense

Visual Code 2010 comes with improved Code Intellisense which enables users to quickly search for inline keywords, search for properties, methods or functions using abbreviations. ‘Reference Assemblies’ also makes multi-targeting 100% accurate than in Visual Studio 2008.

Improved Split screen

In VS 2008, it was possible to feed design and code screens to separate monitors. In the new IDE, it is now possible to further split the single child windows into separate windows across multiple monitors for efficient programming.

Parallel computing and debugging

Parallel programming and debugging will make it possible to write, execute and debug programs faster than they were in VS 2008. With parallel programming, users will be able to harness the full power of multi-processor systems. Further, the new version accompanies a set of visual tools that will facilitate debugging while viewing threads simultaneously. This is almost similar to the Parallel Extensions in .NET Framework.

Quicker Code Navigations

Compared to visual Studio 2008, the 2010 release comes with a host of features that make navigation and search functionalities a breeze through. “Navigate to” is one such function that enables users to quickly do an incremental search of classes, functions, properties, etc.

Accurate Multi-targeting

Visual Studio 2008 supported multi-targeting, however, the results displayed were pertaining only to .NET 3.5 Framework. This made programming difficult since the results also included tools that were not available in other Frameworks. In VS 2010, multi-targeting has been improved to ensure that the displayed items are actually those available for use.

These are the new feature introductions and improvements in Visual Studio 2010 that further makes it a tool for flexible and flawless programming.