Developers, you should know that every demo at PDC was done using VS2010 and there are lots of sessions that dive into the new features. An existing but little used VS2010 feature (that may go as far back as the very first VS) is T4 templates. These are code generation templates that developers can customize to pragmatically create code. Scott Hanselman show this technique at 20 minutes into his talk FT59: ASP.NET MVC 2: Ninjas Still on Fire Black Belt Tips.Designers, VS2010 also includes a design surface to help developers create GUI in WPF/XAML. It works well for simple GUI composition, but is not good for real creative work. Blend is the tool of choice for creating GUI with animations or custom controls that use Virtual State Manager.
For non-developers, there are only 2 things you need to know about this tool:
1) VS2010 can generate code for any version of the .NET framework in existence; this feature is called multi-target deployment. Developers can port their projects to VS2010 without being forced to upgrade to a specific version of .NET. By simply flipping a compiler switch, you can retarget your application to take advantage of later versions of .NET. I have tried this on software I wrote for .NET 1.1 and it works great. It runs in .NET 3.5 and 4.0 without any issues.
2) In building VS2010, Microsoft’s main focus was developer productivity. I have found that I was immediately productive with VS2010 and took advantage of many of the new features, like a visual form builder for Silverlight applications, intuitively.
Bottom Line: developers should install and start working with VS 2010 right away. Simple new features, like being able to open VS2010 windows on multiple separate monitors, will improve developer productivity or at least reduce programmer fatigue. Also check out CL09: How Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Was Built with WPF 4 to see how Microsoft uses their own technology to build their own products. This talk also shows a tool named Snoop that lets you see all the layers of the WPF tree being rendered: Snoop.
Quality Assurance, Testing, Performance and Source Code Control
These tools make the difference between hacking out code and developing software professionally. I have an interest in all these tools but they are not my primary focus, so here is a quick list of the sessions I attended or watched and my comments.
CL25: Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler: If you are building / testing / debugging web applications, Fiddler is a tool that can let you see communication between your web browser and the server. This talks show how that and other features of Fiddler can help you create web applications.
CL32: Developing Testable Silverlight Applications: This talks shows, in detail, how to build automated unit tests for Silverlight applications that can mimic user interaction. It also shows how you can write applications that are more testable by using the MV-VM pattern.
FT35: Microsoft Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks: Learn some productivity tips that are new in VS2010. Learn how to get a deeper insight into your code and improve your speed to solution. DJ Park proves it by racing the clock to generate code, a must-see event 43 minutes in. Also check out CodeRush Xpress for C# . It is a free refactoring tool that lets you move around bodies of C# code while preserving the coding intent. Also check out the Architecture Explorer in VS2010, 13 minutes into the talk.
FT54: Power Tools for Debugging: Debugging is hard; VS2010 has some new debugging tools like Intellitrace to make it easier. But this talk is mainly about research into future debugging tools. They show a Holmes, a statistical debugger that can find a correlation between code paths and test failures.
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