Microsoft Eyes Visual Studio Advancements

With the planned Visual Studio 2010 software development environment, Microsoft intends to offer a new editor for visually appealing applications. The WPF effort and other developer-related revelations will be aired Monday at the TechEd developers conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Microsoft is changing the user interface and the user experience of Visual Studio, for the first time in more than a decade, and it's going to make VS itself a WPF application. The environment will be re-skinned to offer a much more compelling user experience.

Developers already can create WPF applications in the currently available Visual Studio 2008 release. But the 2010 version would itself leverage WPF. The upgrade would arrive around late 2009 based on estimated two-year release cycles for Visual Studio.

Also planned for the 2010 release is a code-focused enhancement called "generate from usage," in which code recognizes what the developer is trying to do and writes code on the developer's behalf. Inferences are made from code. This feature already is included in the Community of Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2010 released last week.

Visual Studio 2010 will feature full support for the Silverlight 2 rich Internet application plug-in technology.

Other features planned for Visual Studio 2010 focus on developing applications for the planned Windows 7 client operating system. Developers will be able to take advantage of the ribbon interface and live icons, which show a thumbnail image of file contents. Developers also can use Windows 7 search capabilities to search the OS for documents, metadata, and e-mail. Multitouch capabilities also can be leveraged. 

Windows 7 multitouch and ribbon capabilities are to be available for both native code developers writing in C++ and managed code developers building on the .Net Framework.

C++ investments in Visual Studio 2010 include a renovation of the C++ IDE to support trends, such as parallel computing, cloud, and Web services. The environment scales to large code bases typical of C++ sources, Microsoft said.

Developers also can use Visual Studio 2010 to develop and debug SharePoint collaboration applications