Designed to improve the existing applications and to speed up the developer's job, VS 2010 brings in updates and new functionalities which are based on the existing concepts. So, everything will seem familiar and there will be no need to read and waste time adapting to the new concepts. For a software company this means saving time and enhancing performances, which in the end lead to a better product and satisfied customer.
One of the most important improvements made by Microsoft in VS 2010 is redesigning the IDE. It now supports: multiple-monitors, new code Intellisense, multiple document windows together with floating tools windows, code navigation and a new code visualization support which permits the user to easily see the relationships between classes and projects inside certain projects and to produce automatically sequence diagrams as well as chart execution flow.
The entire IDE shell has been rewritten using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), while the MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) has helped redesign the internals, offering in this way more extensibility points for easily modifying the comportment of IDE.
Another plus is that the editor built on the WPF technology (in .Net Framework 4) supports HTML and JavaScript snippets, new and richer features of Debugger and Profilining (such as Intellitrace) and an enhanced tool for parallel debugging. Thanks to the multi-targeting support, VS 2010 is compatible with .Net 2, .Net 3 and 3.5, as well as .Net 4 applications. The TFS 2010 (Team Foundation Server) can be installed easily and permits dynamic source-control and permanent integration support.
The best part is that VS 2010 can be used to develop apps for Windows 7, is compatible with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and IBM DB2 databases, it supports Silverlight apps and has a new dynamic help tool called Help System (replacing the MSDN Library viewer). It's also important to know that the newest version of Visual Studio doesn't support development for Windows Mobile previous to Windows Phone 7.
So, no matter if you develop consoles, site, or web applications, and no matter how fond you are of Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010 offers plenty of reasons to upgrade and to give it a try.
