Executive Summary

Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 are major updates to Microsoft’s development platform, offering an enhanced working environment and new tools and libraries that could help development teams build more capable and efficient applications with higher quality than before. Additions and improvements address emerging computing trends such as parallelism, aim to help development teams collaborate more efficiently, and provide support for developing applications for the newest Microsoft platforms, such as Windows 7 and the Windows Azure platform.

Benefits of the newest platform could be realized across all categories of software development, but teams should consider the cost and effort required to upgrade, including training and existing project migration. Also, the new offerings will cause teams to make some key architectural choices, such as choosing the Web Forms or Model-View-Controller development pattern when building Web applications, and deciding whether to move to the entirely new—yet not entirely backward compatible—Windows Workflow Foundation 4.