Although there is some time until the official release of Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft has been kind enough to provide us early adopters a beta version to play with. Fortunately for me in I had actual work to do using the new visual studio and decided it was a good fit for me. I especially liked these four new features of the IDE:
- It’s Fast – I don’t know if the final version will have the same performance but visual studio loads up quickly and loads a solution lightning fast. I only hope that the good developers of visual studio will add some improvment to the notoriously slow “Add Reference” dialog.
- Historical Debugger – One of the new killer features added. Ever debugged a piece of code only to step over a method that thrown an exception and had to start it all over? never again just rollback to where the code when boom and analyze it. Pavel has a written a post on how it works.
- C++ background compiler – This one is the one feature I have been waiting for since I’ve started programming C++. All of us C++ programmers could only envy VB’ers that know when they have a compilation error without actually compiling the code, now C++ gets a little performance boost in the form of a compilers that runs in the background and let you know then minute you wrote something wrong. The days of failing compilation (with 210 errors) just because I forgot a semi colon in some file are gone!
- F# Support – the new kid on the block. Although I haven’t played with it yet I really like the fact that this .NET language has become a 1st grade citizen in my IDE. hopefully similar .NET languages will follow (IronPython).
VS2010 has many more new features and goodies but those four had caught my eye. I think its safe to say that all .NET (and some C++) developers would benefit from this new version of visual studio.
Labels: Visual Studio 2010