Visual Studio has been Microsoft’s cornerstone development product since way back in the Visual Basic (VB) days. Visual Studio 2010 continues that long tradition with a revamped UI and several new features that further cement the product as the premier code development platform. In this article I review Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 release and discuss some of its most important new features.
New Editions
Microsoft made some big changes to the editions of Visual Studio that are offered in the 2010 release. The old Visual Studio Standard Edition was dropped and replaced with a new high-end Ultimate Edition. In addition, an all-new Test Professional Edition was added to the product lineup. Visual Studio 2010 consists of the following editions:
- Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN Essentials
- Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN
- Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN
- Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
- Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN
All the paid editions of Visual Studio now come with an MSDN subscription. At the low end is Visual Studio 2010 Professional, with a one-year MDSN Essentials subscription that provides access to the current core Windows platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter. In the middle of the lineup, Visual Studio 2010 Professional provides access to the core Windows platforms, previous versions of Windows, and SQL Server. This edition doesn’t provide access to other Microsoft server platforms. At the high end, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate offers a full MSDN subscription. If you’re interested in the cloud, each edition provides access to Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. For more information about Visual Studio 2010 editions, including prices and feature sets, see Table 1. You can find even more detailed information about the features available in different versions of Visual Studio 2010 at www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products.
Windows Presentation Foundation–Based IDE
One of the biggest and certainly the most obvious changes in Visual Studio 2010 is the updated UI used in the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Notably, the new interface doesn’t sport the Ribbon that is now prevalent in many other new Microsoft products. Figure 1 shows Visual Studio 2010’s new Windows Presentation Foundation–based IDE.
Windows Presentation Foundation gives Visual Studio 2010 several capabilities that weren’t present in previous versions. Unlike the earlier versions of Visual Studio that used a bitmap-based interface, Visual Studio 2010’s Windows Presentation Foundation–based IDE is vector based, which gives Visual Studio 2010’s IDE zoomability that wasn’t available in the bitmap-based interface. On a more subtle level the fonts are clearer and crisper. In addition, you can zoom in on parts of the interface, and you can add interface extensions from the Visual Studio Gallery at visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us.
The new IDE also sports several improved workability enhancements. For example, in Figure 2 you can see the improved highlight bar on the left side of the editing window that graphically shows the lines of code that have been changed. Visual Studio 2010 also has a new bracket matching feature. Positioning the cursor next to a code bracket automatically highlights the matching bracket. IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2010 supports two modes: statement completion and the new suggestion mode. Suggestion mode lets you use members before they’re defined. You can toggle between completion mode and suggestion mode using Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar.
Another important enhancement in the Visual Studio 2010 interface is its multiple monitor support. Previous versions of Visual Studio used a multiple-document interface (MDI) layout, in which all child windows were displayed with the frame of the parent IDE window. This approach didn’t let the IDE effectively take advantage of multiple monitors. The Visual Studio 2010 IDE allows free-floating windows that can be placed outside the borders of the main IDE. You can use Visual Studio 2010’s multiple monitor support to display the primary editor in your main monitor, then drag the Toolbox and other utility windows onto your additional monitors—keeping them out of the way and giving you more code editing real estate while simultaneously keeping your Toolbox and other windows handy and readily available. In addition, Visual Studio 2010 remembers the window layout you were using, so you can have one set of windows for development and a different window layout for debugging.
Visual Studio 2010 includes several other enhancements. A new Navigate To search feature in the toolbar lets you quickly search and identify strings across all the files in your project. If you enter a search string and press Enter, all the occurrences of the substring are highlighted in your code. Visual Studio 2010’s Snippet editor supports JScript. In addition, IntelliSense was added for JQuery.
Although the majority of my experiences with Visual Studio 2010’s interface were positive, I don’t like the product’s all-browser-based Help. The new Windows Presentation Foundation screen definitely looks cool, but I found the editing experience to be a bit slower and less crisp than in previous versions of Visual Studio. You also need to be aware that after you convert a Visual Studio 2008 project to Visual Studio 2010, you’ll no longer be able to open the project with Visual Studio 2008.