Visual Studio 2010 Released!

Hi everyone, I hope you are enjoying your year so far.

This one is for the developers out there. I’m that if you are a keen C#, VB or C++ developer, you have been trying out the betas and release candidate for Visual Studio 2010. Well great news, Visual Studio 2010 has been released and is ready for you to start developing on.

Now remember, before you start wondering about the price, or look towards those torrent sites, you can get it for free as a student through MSDNAA or www.dreamspark.com

No excuses!

VS2010 features some awesome new additions like true multi-monitor support, editor zooming using the powerful new WPF code editor, C# 4.0 and C++0x if either of those take your fancy. Microsoft has really added features to bring Visual Studio 2010 into the future.

One feature that is really amazing is the ability to box select in the editor. Forget normal text selection, this allows you to draw a box around code, and only edit that part. Say you want to change a bunch of public variables into private variables, just box select all of the public identifiers and type private, done!

C# 4.0 alone has tons of new features, including integration with the dynamic runtime (easy scripting), and all of the Windows 7 features integrated into the .NET library. (Touch, Jumplists etc)

If you aren’t a fan of angle brackets, there are plenty of new features in Visual Basic 2010 as well, including implicit line continuation (goodbye underscore!), auto-implemented properties, and collection initialisers.

If you want a full overview of all of the new features, then head here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063(v=VS.100).aspx

Scott Hanselman has a great overview of the key new features here:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudio2010Released.aspx

Don’t forget that you can get all of these features for free through DreamSpark:

https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/Product.aspx?ProductId=25

 

Something special for all of those developers who want to take advantage of the new touch input features in Windows 7 and .NET 4.0. The Microsoft Surface blog has announced the availability of the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch beta. This is a set of Controls, APIs, templates and Docs that were previously only available to Surface developers, and now they can be used by anyone developing touch enabled applications for Windows 7.

More details at the surface blog here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/archive/2010/04/12/launch-microsoft-surface-toolkit-for-windows-touch-beta.aspx

and a direct link to the toolkit download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=801907a7-b2dd-4e63-9ff3-8a2e63932a74

Happy coding!