Visual Studio 2010 Features and Enhancements – what a dotnet developer wants!

Well Visual Studio as we all know is a super tool that we Dotnet guys use. I just got to know it more when we migrated all our solutions from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010(Well, the credit for migrating successfully goes to Kiran Patil who did it so smoothly!) And that’s how I got to know VS2010 in depth, and during this week, when I was on my small vacation, I tried to learn some very useful things about Visual Studio 2010 s that I can use it more smartly. VS 2010 has surely brought about a type of revolution in the world and taken Dotnet Development to the next generation. For putting in my experience and findings on VS2010 as compared to VS2008, Let me divide into two main things,

Performance Improvements (as compared to previous versions of visual studio)
Features

1. Performance Improvements

Well, here we will discuss in rather the following way… What we had in Visual Studio 2008 and What we have in Visual Studio 2010. Basically the problems that were faced in VS 2008 and that now have been taken care in VS 2010.

When you had “Show All Files” checked in Visual Studi0 2008 in an open solution which contained of hundreds of files or rather thousands (including various Class Library projects and a web app or a windows app), and you started BUILD Solution, it may seem as if VS had gone off to a sleep ;). Hello! Anybody Home? You may not be able to work on VS at that particular time and sometimes, it may even result in a white screen just as if VS was telling us Hey Man! Take a chill pill..! 😀 But now, this is no more the case in Visual Studio 2010.

When you wanted help from Visual Studio 2008, and you selected Help (Search or Index or anything), the Microsoft Document Viewer may take ages to load. Sometimes you start feeling, Oh God… will this load by tomorrow? And obviously, the better option was to search on MSDN or directly in Google, then to search in the VS 2008 Help. Searching in it took a real long time. Also, many a times, while loading the help, it may not allow you to work with Visual Studio :(. Now that was so annoying! It would give you the following screen!

But Now, in Visual Studio 2010, a Help Viewer is started in seconds than in rather minutes. And even searching is faster. 🙂

These were few that I had experienced a lot. There are some others too, but I would like to concentrate on Features rather!

2. Features

Extension Manager

Visual Studio 2010 includes an Extension Manager within the IDE itself. This extension manager makes it very easy for various Developers to search, download and use extensions online.

Extension Manager is opened using the Menu option Tools>Extensions Manager

But again, as the features increase, so does the complexity. Try not to add many extensions to your Visual Studio as it will end up making your working with Visual Studio very slow.. (this is from my personal experience 😉 ) Add only those extensions that are really useful to you! Always apply the KISS Rule(Keep it Simple and Silly)!

For more details on Extension Manager, refer to the following links:

1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293638.aspx

2. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/05/03/visual-studio-2010-extension-manager-and-the-new-vs-2010-powercommands-extension.aspx

3. http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2009/10/24/visual-studio-2010-extension-manager.aspx

4. http://www.infoq.com/articles/extension-manager-2010

Multi-monitor Support

This is I think the best part in case you have multiple monitors attached to your system. Microsoft has made Visual Studio 2010 such that we can take advantage of them. Now, the tabbed documents (the files of our Solution that we open as tabbed docs) are not attached to the VS Frame i.e. they can be moved outside the main VS Frame and taken on to the next screen. Isn’t it cool?? 🙂

For more details on Multi-Monitor Support, refer to the following links:

1. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/08/31/multi-monitor-support-vs-2010-and-net-4-series.aspx

Call Hierarchy

Previously, when searching for use of any particular method or function, we used to right click on the methodname and click “Find All References”. It would take ages to reflect them and then finally some results would appear in the results window. But now, a cool new feature. Goto the methodname, right-click and select “View Call Hierarchy” and bingo! It appears just as you click it. And gives you both the types of details — Calls to Methodname and Calls from Methodname. Just as below.