Developer Tools Overview

Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 shipped in Apr. 2010. These include a major update to team development features, with enhancements for testing and application modeling. With these updates come substantial changes to packaging that eliminates the Team System brand and the separate Team System editions of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

The IDE itself has been rebuilt on Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation user interface (UI) technology and includes a new extensibility framework for plug-ins, helping both Microsoft and ISVs add analysis or other features to the IDE. The IDE also received performance and navigation improvements to handle projects with large numbers of source files and large volumes of code and delivers new language features and debugging tools for applications running on multicore processors.

The Expression Studio suite enables UI and graphic design with Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight. The Blend UI design tool of the suite contains a prototyping feature called SketchFlow that enables developers to quickly produce prototype UIs with sample data and improves fidelity of graphics imported from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Expression Web, the suite’s Web site and page designer, provides a tool called SuperPreview that enables developers to preview a site in multiple browsers simultaneously to catch rendering differences and problems.