On Tuesday, April 13th, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 (which includes ASP.NET 4.0). To get started with Visual Studio 2010 you can either download a trial version of one of the commercialeditions or you can go grab the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition.
The Visual Studio 2010 user experience isnoticeably different than with previous versions. Some of the changes are cosmetic – gone is the decades-old red and orange color scheme, having been replaced with blues and purples – while others are more substantial. For instance, the Visual Studio 2010 shell was rewritten from the ground up to use Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
In addition to an updated user experience, Visual Studio introduces an array of new features designed to improve developer productivity. There are new tools for searching forfiles, types, and class members; it’s now easier than ever to use IntelliSense; the Toolbox can be searched using the keyboard; and you can use a single editor – Visual Studio2010 – to work on.
This article explores some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather highlights those features that I, as an ASP.NET developer, find most useful in my line of work.
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