MS Visual Studio 2010 RC

[Epsilon]

Just finished downloading this about an hour ago.

It promises a host of improvements and productivity boosters.

Lets see how it goes...

[Epsilon]

Well thus far from what I've seen just some of the new features:

JQuery 1.4.1 Intellisense is integrated in the IDE
Charting is included as standard
Major Intellisense inprovemments
Code snippets for HTML and JavaScript
Much more focus on the web developers who may have been feeling a little neglected by now
Code identifier highlights
Friendly URL routing

To name just a few.

+ The new IDE is like its 10 years from the future compared to the last one.

I haven't had a chance to get my hands dirty with almost of these items but you can be sure it has got the juices flowing for coding again.

I can certainly see this making my life a lot easier and more productive in the future...

[Epsilon]

Having worked myself through some of the excellent examples and illustrations provided by Scott Guthrie regarding Visual Studio 2010 I must say I am impressed.

Here are some of the major improvements sourced from Scott's blog.
They are but brief synopsis but click on the links to Scott's blog to read the full description if you are interested.

Clean Web Config Files

"Over the last few releases, the web.config files within new ASP.NET projects have steadily increased in size. For example: the default web.config file that is added to a new web project in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is now some 126 lines long, and contains everything from tag definitions to definitions of handlers and modules to be included in the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline."

In VS2010 RC you will see this reduced to about 9 lines by default which makes for much less clutter and a far more readable file.

Starter Project Templates

"Today’s post is about another small, but I think nice, change coming with VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4 when you create new ASP.NET Web projects – which is the ability to create both “Empty projects” as well as to create projects that already have some layout and common functionality included in them, and which can help you get started when building a new application."

Multi-Targeting Support

"VS 2010 can be installed “side by side” with previous versions of Visual Studio. What this means is that you can install it on the same machine as VS 2008/VS 2005/VS 2003 – and use all of the versions at the same time if you’d like.

.NET 4.0 can also be installed “side by side” with previous versions of .NET on the same machine. .NET 4.0 has a new version number for both the framework libraries and CLR engine – which means it runs completely independently from .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. What this means is that you can install .NET 4.0 on a machine that has .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5 installed, and configure some applications to run using .NET 4.0 and others to run using the older .NET versions (the IIS admin tool allows you to configure this for ASP.NET applications). This allows you to use .NET 4.0 for new applications - without having to necessarily test and upgrade all your existing ones."

Multi-Monitor Support

"VS 2008 hosts all documents/files/designers within a single top-level window – which unfortunately means that you can’t partition the IDE across multiple monitors.

VS 2010 addresses this by now allowing editors, designers and tool-windows to be moved outside the top-level window and positioned anywhere you want, and on any monitor on your system. This allows you to significantly improve your use of screen real-estate, and optimize your overall development workflow."

Code Optimized Web Development Profile

"Today’s post covers a new “Web Development (Code Optimized)” profile option we are introducing with VS 2010 that allows you to optionally configure Visual Studio to run in an IDE layout mode that hides the WYSIWYG web designer and instead optimizes around a rich “source editing focused” tooling experience."

My personal preference is to work in a non-WYSIWYG environment so this comes as good news.

ASP.NET, HTML, JavaScript Snippet Support

"Today’s post covers another useful improvement in VS 2010 – HTML/ASP.NET/JavaScript snippet support. Snippets allow you to be more productive within source view by allowing you to create chunks of code and markup that you can quickly apply and use in your application with a minimum of character typing.

Visual Studio has supported the concept of “snippets” for VB and C# in previous releases – but not for HTML, ASP.NET markup and JavaScript. With VS 2010 we now support snippets for these content types as well."

Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications

"Today’s post covers a small, but nice, new feature that you can now optionally take advantage of with ASP.NET 4 - the ability to automatically startup and proactively initialize a web application without having to wait for an external client to hit the web server. This can help you provide a faster response experience for the first user who hits the server, and avoids you having to write custom scripts to “warm up” the server and get any data caches ready. It works with all types of ASP.NET applications – including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based applications."

URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms

"URL routing was a capability we first introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, and which is already used within ASP.NET MVC applications to expose clean, SEO-friendly “web 2.0” URLs. URL routing lets you configure an application to accept request URLs that do not map to physical files. Instead, you can use routing to define URLs that are semantically meaningful to users and that can help with search-engine optimization (SEO).

For example, the URL for a traditional page that displays product categories might look like below:

http://www.mysite.com/products.aspx?category=software

Using the URL routing engine in ASP.NET 4 you can now configure the application to accept the following URL instead to render the same information:

http://www.mysite.com/products/software

With ASP.NET 4.0, URLs like above can now be mapped to both ASP.NET MVC Controller classes, as well as ASP.NET Web Forms based pages."

Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010

"Developers need to be able to easily navigate, search and understand the code-base they are working on. In usability studies we’ve done, we typically find that developers spend more time reading, reviewing and searching existing code than actually writing new code.

The VS 2010 code editor adds some nice new features that allow you to more productively search and navigate a code-base, and enable you to more easily understand how code is being used within a solution. "

VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements

"In today’s blog post I’m going to cover a small but really nice improvement to code intellisense with VS 2010 – which is its ability to better filter type and member code completion. This enables you to more easily find and use APIs when writing code."

WPF 4

"WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is one of the core components of the .NET Framework, and enables developers to build rich, differentiated Windows client applications. WPF 4 includes major productivity, performance and capability improvements – in particular in the areas of Controls, XAML, Text, Graphics, Windows 7 integration (multitouch, taskbar integration, etc), Core Fundamentals, and Deployment. This is the first of several posts I’ll do over the coming months about some of the improvements and new features.

I will do a separate post soon that covers some of the major advances coming with VS 2010’s WPF and Silverlight Designer – which also includes a ton of improvements."

Add Reference Dialog Improvements

"The slow performance of the “Add Reference” dialog in previous releases of Visual Studio has been a common complaint that many a developer (including yours truly) has ranted about.

Previous releases of VS opened the “Add Reference” dialog on the “.NET” tab by default – and when that tab was loaded VS would synchronously scan the global assembly cache (GAC) retrieving .NET assembly information. Because the GAC scan was done on the UI thread, it would freeze the IDE until the scan completed – which meant that you couldn’t cancel the operation, even if you didn’t want to use that tab.

Because GAC scans can often take awhile (if you have lots of assemblies installed and/or a slow hard drive), you could end up having to wait a really long time for the dialog to respond.

The release of VS 2010 introduces a few welcome changes to the “Add Reference” dialog behavior that significantly improves its performance. "


My thanks to Scott Guthrie for publishing this series of blogs on some of the new features of Visual Studio 2010.
I'm sure there will be a lot more to follow.

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[Epsilon]

Some valuable additional information can be found at CodeProject:

What is New in ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 IDE

There are some nice tips on C# 4.0 language enhancements as well.