Is there anything new in Visual Studio 2010?

http://coliveira.net/2009/05/visual-studio-10-beta-is-available/

by coliveira • 17 years ago

9 16 17 years ago

To be honest, what I'm looking forward to most in VS2010 is the revamped IDE, and particularly the Call Heirarchy feature - which shows you the heirarchy of everything your method calls into (and vice versa).

bep• 17 years ago

The IDE is redesigned and now uses WPF. Also, the Historical Debugger sounds intriguing.

dmlorenzetti• 17 years ago

Oliveira's "new features in Visual Studio" are all programming languages it now supports-- in other words, the development environment is synonymous with the compilers bundled with it.

When I left Windows as a development platform (maybe 10 years ago), it took a while to appreciate how deep the Unix philosophy of "compact, orthogonal tools" really runs. Now, though, it would never occur to me to describe a new compiler as a "feature" of the other tools I use.

I'm not sure that the difference in worldview really matters. I doubt that I'm significantly more productive now than I was with Visual Studio. However, I do feel incredibly straightjacketed whenever I have to go back to VS, as if that monolithic view of software is imposing itself on me, rather than letting me do what I want as I want.

wglb• 17 years ago

It seems like adding features often reduces functionality or utility.

rbanffy6• 17 years ago

VS is required to develop software that will run on Windows (and that will forever be handcuffed to Windows). I do not wish to develop such an abomination, but many people won't have the same moral objections.

VS is Microsoft's "Office for developers" application. It's only reasonable to tout the features os languages and compilers not available elsewhere from Microsoft as features of the whole thing, because Windows developers have no other option.

citizenparker2• 17 years ago

VS is required to develop software that will run on Windows

I'm sure the user base of the delightful open source #develop making Windows apps will be sad to hear this, as will everyone using VS to develop against Mono.

Which compilers are part of VS that aren't available elsewhere?

rbanffy6• 17 years ago

Mono is something weird. I confess I fail to understand what drives clever people to hand over the design goals of their open-source project to Microsoft. They are clever people doing an extraordinarily stupid thing. And .NET apps are as much Windows apps as Java or Squeak apps are - they happen to run on Windows and, if you care enough, you may be able to run them elsewhere - and many do.

At least until the next broad Microsoft patent-infringment lawsuit. Mono is toxic in that regard - Microsoft may decide to start a FUD campaign anytime they want and Mono just gives them a huge stick. If that's not a dumb thing to do, I am not sure what would qualify.

As for the compilers, I am quite sure you cannot obtain any Microsoft compiler that is sold as part of VS without at least some part of VS. You can run them from the command line (if you could call cmd.exe a command-line) and you can download them from Microsoft for free, but saying that they are available "elsewhere" is a bit of an overstatement.

rbanffy6• 17 years ago

You also seem to imply the #develop user base can be compared to the Visual Studio user base. I would like to check your numbers as I suspect the active user #develop-to-Visual Studio ratio is very close to zero. Were VS not a requirement, your number should be above, say, .3?

citizenparker2• 17 years ago

It's a shame the author isn't really distinguishing between Visual Studio 2010 and v4 of the Common Language Runtime / Dynamic Language Runtime.

VS 2010 has some neat integration points but isn't really of interest to the HN community - an in-depth look at v4 (particularly the DLR) however is worth chatting about sometime.

Is there anything new in Visual Studio 2010?

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