SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2010 provides an alternative to creating SharePoint applications through SharePoint Designer. Visual Studio promotes rapid SharePoint development by providing such features as advanced debugging tools, IntelliSense, statement completion, and project templates. Visual Studio also takes advantage of advanced .NET Framework-based tools and languages. SharePoint projects can be developed by using either Visual Basic or Visual C#.
Silverlight and WPF Data Binding in Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2010 now offers Drag and Drop data binding for WPF applications. After you add a data source to your project, you can generate data-bound Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) controls by dragging items from the Data Sources window to the WPF Designer.
Core Coding Experience in Managed Languages
Visual Studio 2010 is an exciting release in managed languages and tools. Visual C# and Visual Basic languages continue to evolve towards feature parity, strive to simplify programming and deployment with the Microsoft Office APIs, and allow easy interop to dynamic languages. Visual F# is a new programming language which combines functional, object-oriented and explorative programming to provide a succinct, expressive and scalable language for .NET. In the tools space, Visual Studio 2010 offers greater support for Test-Driven Development, where tests are written before product code as an iterative approach to software design.
Native Development
Visual C++ 2010 provides a powerful and flexible development environment for creating Microsoft Windows-based and Microsoft .NET-based applications.
Parallel Computing
The Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework 4 and the Concurrency Runtime for Visual C++ 2010 enable developers to leverage parallel computing. By using these frameworks, developers can write parallel applications that will scale efficiently as the numbers of cores and processors increase. By avoiding the complexities of thread-focused programming models, the new parallel libraries simplify the production of parallel code and enable developers to more easily take advantage of parallel hardware. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 also provides new debugging and profiling tools to help developers understand and verify the behavior of their parallel applications.
Visual Studio Extensibility
Downloading and managing extensions has never been easier. The ability to find and download your favorite extension is now integrated into common dialogs like the New Project Dialog. Configuring, managing and uninstalling extensions is much easier through the new Extension Manager.
Office Development in Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2010 comes with improved Office Development functionality. You can now deploy multiple Office Solutions in one package which will appear as a single entry in the Add/Remove Programs in Windows XP or Programs and Features in Windows Vista. Visual Studio 2010 now also allows you to perform additional actions after the Office solution installation is complete such as copy documents or workbooks to the end user computer, create extra registry keys, or modify a configuration file.
Workflow Foundation
Workflow Foundation (WF) provides significant enhancements in this release such as explicit data model and fully declarative experience for authoring activities, a new Flowchart modeling style, deeper integration with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and high performance runtime engine.
Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure.
NOTE: This post was originally at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd441784.aspx. I found it useful, so posting over here.
