Better coding with Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft launched Visual Studio for the first time 13 years ago, its long running flagship integrated development environment. The first edition of 1997 began consolidating version 5 of visual Basic and Visual C + + into a common IDE. Its Enterprise Edition employs some of the most prestigious technologies, including Visual InterDev, Microsoft Transaction Server, and Visual SourceSafe 5.0. The primary purpose of this release is to help developers build distributed applications through components, including both client/server applications and WEB applications.

As a developer, we have come a long way since then. Although the modified client/server and WEB architectures are still dominant in the coding realm, the scope and requirements of these applications exceed the scope of the homogeneous system and the strongly typed object to the object invocation.

Now, the representational state Transfer (REST) and related technologies are becoming the mainstream basic communication mechanism. The application begins to look for a new home in a cloud-based architecture, enabling third parties to gain scalability, reliability, and data security. At the same time, WEB application patterns are moving in line with the commercialization style and standards. Even the hardware is changing, processor speed is close to the theoretical peak of current chip technology, and multi-core systems provide new ways to squeeze higher performance from a single computer.

In this context, and in the urgent demands of software and software developers, Visual Studio 2010 appears in due course. At the same time, armed with new features, it can meet the growing demands of software in a world that is expanding across platforms, cores, styles and standards. This article describes some of the main ways that Visual Studio 2010 addresses today's challenges, helping developers build solutions that can evolve in today's complex industry. Each new feature is not covered here, and the purpose of this article is to highlight some of the specific features that developers can put into use immediately in their daily work. For a complete list of features, you can easily find them in your product documentation.

Visual Studio IDE Improvements

As software development continues to handle increasingly complex situations, developers often feel pressured to improve productivity. Visual Studio 2010 adds several visual features to your editor to help you improve your productivity. In this article, I'll discuss three of these features.

A simpler improvement of the Visual Studio IDE is the ability to drag child windows out of the IDE's parent window. The monitor has become very economical enough for developers to use two (or more) monitors in their work, and this new feature allows you to spread your coding and design windows across multiple screens.

How to: Simply click the Window's tab and drag it outside of the Visual Studio IDE window. You can easily dock by clicking the title bar and dragging the window back to the IDE area, and then aligning the title bar with the tabs of other windows. When you dock again, if the window is properly aligned, you will see a visual hint that the window will darken, indicating that you are ready to dock when you release. Figure 1 shows a code window that is pulled outside the IDE's parent window.

Figure 1 separating windows from the IDE

Another great new feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to box-select and edit vertical blocks of text. Sometimes you need to edit a larger list of items, and you'll find yourself performing a familiar and fast-repeating keyboard sequence (for example, executing the n+ down ARROW + back arrow again and again). Although this may not be the most common problem, it does happen occasionally. Many developers want to be able to select the entire vertical block and apply the same change to all rows at once. Visual Studio 2010 Introduces this block-editing feature.

How to: Hold down the ALT key, and then select the vertical portion that you want to edit. The highlighted area will resemble a single row edit, but the edits will be repeated on the selected line, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Box Selection