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.

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

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.

On October 27th 2008 Microsoft announced Windows® Azure™
the comprehensive cloud environment from Microsoft. With
Windows® Azure™ Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio®
you can build, debug and deploy services and applications
for Windows Azure.

Windows Azure offers a scalable hosting environment for
the Internet, built on geographically distributed data centers.
It handles load balancing and resource management, and
automatically manages the life cycle of a service based on
requirements that you establish. With the service, you include
code specifications for the service topology, the number of
instances to deploy, and any configuration settings. Windows®
Azure™ deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures
to maintain availability.

The Windows Azure environment is designed as a utility
computing model, so that you pay only for the resources
used by your service, while benefitting from the reliability and
performance provided by the hosting environment.

Windows Azure Tools provide the means to create services
and applications within the framework of Visual Studio. That
includes a project model specifically for Windows Azure, as
well as the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio. With Visual
Studio, you can build a package containing your service, and
use Windows Azure Tools to deploy the package to Windows
Azure through the Windows Live Developer Portal.

With ASP.NET, Microsoft delivered a ground breaking
productive development model that made web applications
accessible to the traditional application developer. Over the last
few releases, not only has the tooling in Visual Studio improved
to provide developers with a more web standard set of tools,
but leading features like CSS property grids and split view
design surfaces have been provided.
However the industry evolves, and so do the tool requirements
and patterns that developers use. Web developers are leading
the push to split content from data and to use a Test Driven
Development (TDD) methodology. In Visual Studio 2010,
the next generation of ASP.NET web tools that make it
easy for developers to use TDD to build Model-View-Controller
(MVC) based web sites.
Many ASP.NET Developers have already experienced the
preview release of ASP.NET MVC. All the features in that release
are included in Visual Studio 2010. Ranging from Project
Templates and Solutions that natively describe an ASP.NET MVC
website, to automatic generation of test projects in the web
solutions, to wizard support for common tasks like creating
views from controllers and snippet support for HTML Markup,
the Visual Studio IDE delivers all the support required.
In Visual Studio 2008, was heavy in supporting
JavaScript in the Visual Studio IDE and debugger. In Visual
Studio 2010, there is higher
performance, and standards – compliant JavaScript IntelliSense
engine. These investments enabled Microsoft to announce their
involvement with the JQuery group, and Visual Studio 2010 will
be the first version of Visual Studio to ship JQuery as a native
part of the ASP.NET solution set.
Deployment of websites has been a challenge for developers for
many years. Visual Studio 2010 has full IDE support for a simplified
deployment process for ASP.NET websites. Called “One Click
Deployment”, this process and IDE support provides a wizard,
dialogs and design surfaces that make it simple for developers to
identify the components of a website that need to be deployed,
and handle the process of moving them from the development
machine to the web server, whether that is an internal server for
the organization or a server hosted by a 3rd party site.
“One Click Deployment” also solves the problem of changing
the settings of a website from the development machines to the
final deployed site. Many times developers have sent websites
to deployment with debug tracing turned on or the database
connections set to the development servers. With web.config
transformations, “One Click Deployment” enables a developer
to create a custom set of transforms that will be applied to
the website every time it is deployed and ensures that the
appropriate settings are in the configuration files.
Additionally, Microsoft has just released the Silverlight 2
runtime and tooling for Visual Studio 2008. In Visual Studio
2010, Silverlight is fully supported for developers wishing to
build Silverlight content. Having design surfaces for Silverlight
enables developers to either author original content or to
modify content as part of the designer-developer workflow
that Visual Studio enabled in the last release. Visual Studio
2010 also provides full debugging support for Silverlight and
provides project system integration for developers consuming
this content in various applications types. For example, web
developers building ASP.NET websites will be able to include
existing Silverlight content, and Visual Studio will create the
appropriate test pages and content includes to enable them to
focus debugging on the Silverlight content in the context of the
overall website solution.

• Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
  Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) crosses many roles within an organization and traditionally not every one of the roles has been an equal player in the process. Visual Studio Team System 2010 continues to build the platform for functional equality and shared commitment across an organization’ s ALM process.
• Enabling emerging trends
  Every year the industry develops new technologies and new trends. With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft delivers tooling and framework support for the latest innovations in application architecture, development and deployment.
• Inspiring developer delight
  Ever since the first release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has set the bar for developer productivity and flexibility. Visual Studio 2010 continues to deliver on the core developer experience by significantly improving upon it for roles involved with the software development process.
• Riding the next generation platform wave
  Microsoft continues to invest in the market leading operating system, productivity application and server platforms to deliver increased customer value in these offerings. With Visual Studio 2010 customers will have the tooling support needed to create amazing solutions around these technologies.
• Breakthrough Departmental Applications
  Customers continue to build applications that span from department to the enterprise. Visual Studio 2010 will ensure development is supported across this wide spectrum of applications.

From the design of the application through to the actual writing of the code, one of the most difficult problems has always been that of the bug that can’t be reproduced – the “no-repro” bug. There are a lot of factors that drive these types of bugs and we have worked to create tools to help isolate the issue and allow faster fixes. One of the common blockers to reproducing a bug is the collection of actionable data on the bug.  By dramatically simplifying the tools required to integrate testing across the lifecycle, we are further introducing new non-technical users to the application lifecycle.