Microsoft Releases Visual Studio, .NET Betas

This week, the developers at the PDC(Professional Developer Conference) had the chance to take a first look at Visual Studio 10 and .NET Framework 4.0. Visual Studio 2008 has only been on the market for a few months but Microsoft has already started working on the new version.

Visual Studio 10 is build using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), MS's library for rich visual displays, and this will result in flash and polish not usually seen in something as mundane as a compiler. VS2010 will offer features like multi-monitor support, richer code editing and richer code visualization.

Both Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 will include programming models for adding parallel programming. Such technology is needed with the advent of multi-core processors, since the chips aren't running faster. They are simply adding more cores.

Some applications lend themselves well to parallelism, where multiple portions of the app can execute at the same time. Concurrency is being added into .NET Framework libraries for developing native applications with C++ that execute efficiently on parallel hardware.

.NET 4.0 would feature enhancements to WPF, such as multi-touch and Deep Zoom support, support for dynamic language runtime as well as static programming languages like C#. CLR2 and CLR 4 can both be loaded.