I fired up VS 2008 for the first time today since ages and I was amazed at its speed and ease of use again.
I’ve been breathing Eclipse for the last few months while doing J2ME and Android programming. I think I have 5 different Eclipse installs on my dev box at work (including variants such as MotoDev for Android, Carbide.c++, etc.). While I do love Eclipse for its plugins, refactoring tools, and cross-platform abilities it is still so slow compared to VS it’s unbelievable.
Anyway… VS 2010 arrived today and the new stuff looks very nice but I’ll wait till all the 3rd party C++ libs (Qt and OpenSceneGraph mainly) and the plugins I use make the jump before I do.
What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4?
Buttloads. Here’s the things I’m digging most.
- What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 – The IDE and Editor has really shaped up nicely. I’ve got it installed side-by-side with by existing VS2008 with no problems. There’s hundreds of new things that I can’t fit here, although some favorite IDE features of mine are:
- Multimonitor support – You can drag documents or toolboxes out of the IDE and onto other monitors.
- Zoom - You can “ctrl+scroll” (press the Ctrl key while scrolling your mouse wheel) to zoom in editors or diagrams. The editor has been totally rewritten using WPF.
- Navigate To - Hit “ctrl+comma” to navigate around your files, code, variables or methods much faster than Ctrl-F.
- Code-First Intellisense - You can hit Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar to tell toggle intellisense between regular Intellisense and a more TDD-friendly style that lets you create new classes and methods without getting hassled by the editor.
- Multi-Targeting Support – You can use VS2010 to create (target) .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 or 4 applications. That means you can work on existing applications and get all the new IDE features while also working on new .NET 4 apps, all with the same IDE.
- ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 are included in the box. WebForms now lets you create clean markup (no more tables) that’s semantically correct and CSS-friendly, even for “legacy” controls and clientids that you control. ViewState is way smaller and can be turned on and off with greater granularity. Chart controls are included as well. On the MVC 2 side, we’ve got Areas, Strongly-typed helpers, Templated Helpers, field validation in models, and more. Both MVC and WebForms get all the core ASP.NET 4 improvements like a smaller web.config, the new <%: %> encoding syntax, extensible output caching, preloading of web apps, session state compression and routing for SEO-friendly URLs.
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F# is in the box – F# ships with Visual Studio 2010. There’s a good Introduction to Functional Programming for .NET Developers you should check out to see how you can use F# and how it will augment and complement your current language of choice.- Concurrency, Threading and Parallelism – Check out the Parallel Computing Dev Center and how PLinq, the Task Parallel Library and the Coordination Data Structures work. Understand how to apply parallel patterns with .NET 4 with this awesome whitepaper. There’s also major improvements in the Profiling Tools, including a Concurrency Visualizer for seeing how Multithreaded apps really behave. View their threads and how those threads migrate across cores.
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