Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional review

IntelliSense has been upgraded too. Where traditional code completion provides pick-lists of pre-declared variables and members so that the programmer can insert references automatically, the new code-generation IntelliSense works the other way around. It lets the programmer enter the name of a non-existent class or method and then it auto-generates a matching method or class definition.

Elsewhere, code navigation has been improved by the addition of a call hierarchy browser, although it's only available in C# and C++. This lets you highlight a method or property and see a tree-view of any code that calls it. Unlike the call stack, which is displayed only when debugging, the call hierarchy can be used when writing code. It's an incredibly useful tool that will be hugely appreciated by programmers working on big, complex projects.

A new language - F# - makes its first appearance in Visual Studio 2010

Debugger enhancements include datatips that can be pinned in place so you no longer need to hover your mouse over a variable in order to see its value. You can also add descriptive labels to breakpoints, while the "parallel stack" trace lets you debug parallel code in C#, C++ or Visual Basic.

A new language - F# - makes its first appearance in Visual Studio 2010. This is a language in which functions are the core building blocks that can be passed as values to other functions. While functional programming languages like this aren't new, they have hitherto been more widely used in universities than in commercial development, and in this initial release, F# still seems like a bit of a Visual Studio outsider. It has no real claim to being visual at all (it has no design capabilities built in) and provides a text-based console as its principal interface to running applications.

F# does, however, have some support for Silverlight, and can be used to create Silverlight libraries. In principle, it's also possible to use Microsoft's IronPython and IronRuby languages with Silverlight, but neither of these languages are included in Visual Studio 2010. But despite the fact that they don't form a part of this release, the influence of Ruby and Python can still be seen in the optional dynamic programming features added to C#. Using dynamic programming, the data-types of C# variables don't need to be predeclared but are, instead, inferred much as they are in dynamic languages such as Ruby.

Overall this is a good update to an already excellent IDE. The addition of F# is interesting even though, in its current form, its development tools are basic. The long-overdue Silverlight designer and the improved editing and code navigation features are well worth the price of an upgrade.

Author: Huw Collingbourne