Visual Studio 2010 : A total “New” Experience

After TechEd 09 India, sort of new wave going on in community and forums here in India about .NET 4.0, and must be everywhere in the world. We all know how our forums on Internet are loaded with thread of Migration and Backward compatibility, But no one can help and neither can stop moving ahead, Its need rather than version !

Microsoft is now with us with their new Beta Product as “Visual Studio 2010” [Beta 1],While reading this post, I am sure most of you will be opening new Tab and asking Search engines to get result for “Visual Studio 2010 + download”, well I appreciate your enthusiasm, but it may be in vain since right now as far as I know, it is only available for MSDN subscribers, you need to check that for yourself, I came to know from “Twitter” via MSDN India tweet. So I downloaded that and now giving you my first review.

I have installed Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 on Windows 7 Beta and I already have Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on my machine, Overall experience is smooth with one single restart required. I don’t know about Windows 7 RC and other OS, I think should not be an issue. So here we go…

Let me tell you about the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, Its “WPF” based !, might shock you but this is reality ! ( Great job by both VS and WPF team ), so overall exprience is simply mind blowing and especially it become more rich with that typical “Blue” color of Microsoft all over.

This is the default Start Page you will get for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, This initial screen is then got divided into three core sections as “Welcome”,”Projects” and “Visual Studio”.

  Here in “Project” section, you can find list of old/previously opened projects with a “Pin” symbol to pin that to the list and “X” to remove from list. When you click on New Project you will get the New Project window, which I will discuss here after below Visual Studio section snap.

Once you click on Projects –> New Projects, you will get following New Project Template, more or less similar that we use to have in older version of Visual Studio.

If you observe carefully, In the Target Framework dropdown, now you have total 4 Frameworks to target as .NET 2.0,3.0,3.5 and new one 4.0 (In Common Man’s language “Your Visual Studio 2005 Projects can run in Visual Studio 2010”), Beside this on right hand side, you will find a small section where short information about each Project template is shown once you select a particular,like this :

I tried out using a New ASP.NET website ( I still love ASP.NET despite of my ongoing Silverlight work), Most amazing feature I found is “Snippets while doing HTML”, you just type “sm + Tab” and you will get <asp:ScriptManager> , well this is not only for script manager,but now you will find such snippets for all common controls like dropdownlist,Image,Hyperlink etc and even for Validation Controls. (Don’t worry, I am going to cover these in great details on my upcoming ASP.NET 4.0 posts), Coding in Visual Studio 2010 is fun and productive in terms of time saving. You now have something as “View Call Hierarchy” where you can find all calls made to that particular function/method all over project, you just need to right click on it and choose “View Call Hierarchy” functionality. I have done for Hello() in following example you can see as snap :

“Call To” and “Call From” above is very self explanatory. Beside this there are lot more improvements in search with Quick Search and Quick Replace, So hold your breath for more..I hope this must have made some rich picture of Visual Studio 2010 in your mind, keep that as it is, I will be soon covering new stunning features along with examples on each. So, In coming days you will find more stuff about .NET 4.0, ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and much more along with Silverlight 3.

So don’t wait and waste your time, Grab a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 today and start exploring it !!

Vikram.