Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 is a 'significant update' to Microsoft's developer suite

Microsoft has delivered a significant update to its developer tools with the release of Visual Studio 2010, .Net Framework 4 and Silverlight 4.

Visual Studio now provides developer support not just for Windows PCs, but for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, Windows Phone 7 and for extending the functionality of SharePoint.

Available to download today, Visual Studio 2010 has been given a facelift with numerous enhancements to ease the development process, including the Intellitrace tool that records application execution during testing, plus the ability to map the structure of imported code to help with the maintenance of existing projects.

Jason Zander, Microsoft's general manager for Visual Studio, said that the 2010 release addresses two main areas.

"We have all-new tooling for Azure, Silverlight and Windows Phone, but the biggest update is to application lifecycle management," he said.

Intellitrace is one of these features, recording machine state during code execution and allowing developers to step back and see exactly what happened. The developer can also see a captured WMV of the tester using the app at the same time.

"It's like a digital video recorder for your code," said Zander.

Other features to aid developers include multi-monitor support, so that the code and user interface design can be moved to separate screens, plus an extension manager enabling developers to find and download third-party plug-ins.

Visual Studio 2010 also has more features to take away the donkey work of stitching together code from various sources, according to Zander.

"Our strategy is to find places where we can identify the plumbing you need and do it for you. The code we want you to write is the code that makes your application unique, so we do everything to help you fill in the gaps," he said.