Visual Studio Gets Revamped Integrated Development Environment

Visual Studio 2010 contains a reworked integrated development environment (IDE) with a more capable and extensible source code editor, better performance with large code bases, new profiling views for parallel hardware, an improved build system, and better support for building Silverlight and SharePoint applications. The new release keeps Microsoft’s development platform in sync with new product releases, helps development teams work more efficiently with new and existing application projects, and provides ISVs with new opportunities to deliver extensions.

VS is the most popular IDE for Microsoft’s platforms. The product provides graphical tools and wizards for designing, coding, debugging, and testing both managed applications based on Microsoft’s .NET Framework runtime and the C# and Visual Basic.NET languages, and traditional, unmanaged C and C++ applications. The previous version, VS 2008 SP1, was released in Aug. 2008 and shipped with the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. VS 2010 ships with the .NET Framework 4 and includes tools to take advantage of the new features in the new runtime, such as the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and support for parallel hardware.