Just one year ago I upgraded Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008. There were a number of enhancements that are ‘behind the scenes’ and some notable improvements to intellisense and AJAX, which motivated me to finally upgrade. Well, that and support for .NET 3.5. But it seems that just as soon as I upgraded I started receiving information about Visual Studio 2010.
I took some time to research the product (still in Beta) to see if the list of changes was significant enough to warrant me spending another couple hundred bucks on yet another upgrade. Here’s some of the things I found.
Code Editor
The new Code Editor makes code easier to read. You can zoom in on text by pressing CTRL and scrolling with the mouse wheel. Also, when you click a symbol in Visual C# or Visual Basic, all instances of that symbol are automatically highlighted.
Better tools for Web Development
To me, this is reason enough to upgrade. The publishing and FTP portions of Visual Studio past were a far cry from what Dreamweaver offers. Now with enhanced publishing and rebuilding web.config on the fly, it looks like they have finally caught up.
Creating Web packages
The Web Deployment Tool, also known as MSDeploy, enables you to package your Web application for deployment to an Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server. A Web package is a .zip file or a folder structure that includes everything a Web server needs to host your application. It contains Web content, IIS settings, database scripts, components, registry settings, and certificates. The Web Deployment Tool has been integrated into Visual Studio and enables you to create Web packages with one click.
One-Click Publish
You can now publish to a server by using the Web Deployment Tool, FTP, folder copying, or FrontPage Server Extensions in one click. Visual Studio stores all the setting information, such as publish method, server information, and user credentials.
Web Configuration Transformations
You can now configure your project to transform the web.config file during deployment. When you deploy the project, the settings in web.config automatically match the settings on your debug, staging, and production servers.
It also includes something completely new:
Visual F#
Visual Studio 2010 includes F#, a new .NET Framework language that supports functional programming and traditional object-oriented and imperative (procedural) programming. F# combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET. In other words, you get the best of both paradigms.
Right now I don’t have the time or patience to try another development product so an actual ‘hands on’ review is not coming anytime soon. For now, I’ll have to rely on what I’m reading in order to form an opinion. I think I’ll also wait for the product to go through it’s first service pack release before upgrading. Maybe by then they’ll have the kinks worked out.