Visual Studio 2010 IDE Overview

Understanding existing, and writing new, code

As the complexity of applications grows so does the
challenge of understanding the code that you’re working
on. With Visual Studio 2010 the IDE provides integrated
support for understanding what is happening in the code
section that you’re viewing.

The editor in Visual Studio 2010 has been rebuilt using the
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology. WPF
enables the editor to richly present information about the
code in the context of presenting the actual source. This ability
enables features such as the “Document Map Margin” to render
a graphical view of the source file including information such as
layout, code coverage, symbol highlights and comments.

This editor ability also enables 3rd parties to create add-ins
that show custom views of the underlying source file such as
taking the XML Doc Comments and converting them to a rich
presentation formation with fonts, colors and highlighting. It
enables Visual Studio to display different layers on the editor
so an add-in could represent a code-based formula in its
traditional mathematical representation.

While the representation of the underlying source code is
important so is the ability to understand what the code is
actually doing. In Visual Studio 2010, features such as “Inline
Call Hierarchy” – a feature which enables a developer to select
an entity or method and see how the code calls inwards or
outwards or passes the entity in and out of the code section
- provide developers with the ability to understand the
interaction of the code without needing to juggle multiple
files. Other features such as “Highlight References”, which
provide a visual representation of the references to a selected
entity in the code without needing to use the “Find In Files”
feature, or “Quick Searching”, which delivers a ‘word wheel’
based search tool integrated with “Highlight References”,
enable developers to maintain the context of where they are
but gain the understanding of other locations in the code.

Additionally the editor integrates with the project system to
simplify the pattern of Test Driver Development (TDD). With
TDD, developers build the tests that will exercise their application
code before they actually write that code. In Visual Studio
2010 developers can create tests and the editor will provide
functionality to automatically implement the tested classes and
code in the file the developer chooses. This enables developers to
quickly create the class they are consuming without needing to
break out of the test development flow to declare the tested class.

Visual Studio 2010 – My Review

Hi Guys, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 CTP in October. You’ll be amazed with the download size its near about 7 GB. You can download it from here.

After you download you’ll run the .exe file to extract the setup and the setup is of the .vhd format that is Virtual PC hard disk. So you’ll need Virtual PC to run Visual Studio 2010.

But, but, but guys please check out the minimum requirement for this CTP to run. Hard disk space required is 75 GB, yes, its not 7.5 but 75 GB. Well that’s not true you can have this CTP run if you have upto 25 GB on one drive.

When you extract the .exe file the .vhd file extracted is of size 23 GB.  Also when you bind the .vhd file to the virtual pc, you need minimum 1GB ram allocated to the Virtual PC disk.

When I ran the Visual Studio for the first time the screen took around 10 mins to load and I just shut down the CTP and got back to work.

The reason for the extracted file to be of 23 GB is because that VHD when you map to Virtual PC will have Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2008,  SQL  Server 2008, SQL Server 2005 + many more software installed.

When you execute the Virtual PC which is mapped to VHD, Virtual PC will load Windows Server 2008 and it takes lots of  burden it killed my laptop. Although I have fair enough configuration. My processor is Core 2 Duo, 1.83 GHZ and with 1 GB ram. Yet it just killed my PC performance.

I even tried to extract the file on an External Hard Disk and Even on my IPod classic. But I was able to extract only first rar file. I googled the reason and found it was because the External Hard Disk is of FAT32 format and they do not support data transfer of more than 4GB. So I had to clean up my Hard Disk and extract 23 GB .vhd file there.

I really did not understood why Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2010 this way. With 7GB download size and 23 GB extracted file. I was really disappointed with such strategy. Microsoft must have shipped Visual Studio 2010 as a single file. What could be the reason for adopting this process?

Here is my Virtual PC screen shot with Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Parallel Development Overview

Parallel Development

As demands for application performance increased, customers
have traditionally solved the problem by simply increasing the
underlying power of the hardware that the application is running
on. Over the last several years developers have seen the CPUs
that their applications run on start to include 2, 4 or more cores.
While the power of the hardware has increased, the transition
to a multi-core environment has impacted the applications that
developers write. The majority of applications will not be able to
automatically take advantage of this multi-core hardware change.
Developers will need to modify the way they write applications
and the architectures they use for these applications.

Creating parallel capable code using current technologies is
unfortunately not trivial. Multi-thread programming introduces
not only application architecture challenges to complexity and
robustness but also exposes the tooling developers use as being
optimized for single-threaded development.

Microsoft is making a major commitment to make parallel
development accessible to a wide range of developers, whether
they are using native code or the .NET Framework. With Visual
Studio 2010 we are delivering:

• Visual Studio IDE support for Parallel development
• Native C++ libraries and compiler support
for Parallel applications

The .NET Framework 4.0 also provides the core framework
support to build parallel applications through technologies such
as P-LIINQ and parallel language semantics and framework
components. Visual Studio 2010 provides integrated parallel
development support. In Visual Studio 2010 the debugger is
aware of the parallel nature of code and can present the state of
the application execution during debugging across the different
parallel execution units. The debugger also has custom displays
for parallel code such as task & thread windows and a “multi” or
“cactus” stack view window that graphically shows the execution
path of the individual tasks.

Being able to develop and debug your application doesn’t
mean that it takes advantage of all the available power. To
help developers do this, Visual Studio 2010 also includes
a parallel capable performance analyzer that enables you
to extensively instrument you code to visually see the
concurrency issues that are in your applications. Combine
this with the features of the Visual Studio IDE, and developers
have a highly productive, visual environment for building the
best parallel capable applications available.