The following illustration shows the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

• Visual enhancements

  The IDE has been redesigned for improved readability. Unnecessary lines and gradients have been removed to reduce clutter.

• Support for multiple monitors

  Document windows such as the Code Editor and Design view window can now float outside the IDE window. For example, you can drag the Code Editor out of the IDE so that you can view it and the Design view window side by side.

• Code Editor

  The new Code Editor makes code easier to read. You can zoom in on text by pressing CTRL and scrolling with the mouse wheel. Also, when you click a symbol in Visual C# or Visual Basic, all instances of that symbol are automatically highlighted. For more information, see What's New in the Visual Studio 2010 Editor.

• Search-as-you-type

  The new Navigate To feature provides search-as-you-type support for files, types, and members. Navigate To enables you to take advantage of Camel casing and underscores to abbreviate your search text. For example, you can use "AOH" to search for "AddOrderHeader". For more information, seeHow to: Search for Objects, Definitions, and References (Symbols).

• Call Hierarchy

  In Visual C#, Call Hierarchy enables you to navigate from a member to the members that call it and to the members that it calls. This is useful for exploring object-oriented code. For more information, see Call Hierarchy.

A redesigned Threads window provides filtering, call-stack searching and expansion, and grouping. Also, you can now organize and search breakpoints and share them with other developers. For more information, see What's New in the Visual Studio Debugger.

Features in the IDE, such as Add Reference and the Toolbox, now correspond to the version of the .NET Framework or Silverlight that your project targets. As a result, types, members, and controls from assemblies that target an earlier version of the .NET Framework do not appear in IntelliSense and produce background compilation errors. For example, if your project targets .NET Framework 2.0 and you use a language feature that .NET Framework 2.0 does not support, such as anonymous types, the IDE will mark the code as an error. For more information, see Targeting a Specific .NET Framework Version or Profile.

In Visual Basic or Visual C#, the IDE can generate code stubs for new types and members from their usage before they have been defined. As a result, you can write tests first, and then generate the code that is required to compile the tests. Additionally, IntelliSense now provides a suggestion mode that prevents IntelliSense from automatically completing a type or member that has not yet been defined. For more information, see Generate From Usage and List Members.

Visual Basic has added features that shorten syntax and enable you to write code faster. These features include auto-implemented properties, implicit line continuation, collection initializers, and single and multi statement lamdba expressions. Additionally, Visual Basic now supports simplified deployment through type equivalence. For more information, see What's New in Visual Basic 2010.

The new features in the C# language work together to simplify programming with the Microsoft Office APIs. With named and optional arguments, you no longer have to specify values for every optional parameter when you call COM methods. With dynamic support, you can reference any object, such as return values from COM APIs or dynamic languages, without using an explicit type cast. Also, you can simplify deployment by embedding types from the primary interop assemblies (PIAs) directly in your assembly. This feature is known as type equivalence support. For more information, see What's New in Visual C# 2010.

• Code Snippets

  Visual Studio 2010 includes Code Snippets for HTML, JScript, and ASP.NET controls to help you write code faster. You can insert snippets from the Code Snippets Manager or directly from IntelliSense. 

• Dramatically improved IntelliSense for JScript

  • IntelliSense now parses 2 to 5 times faster, so there is virtually no processing delay, even with large script libraries.

  • IntelliSense accepts diverse coding styles so that you get full IntelliSense support for almost every library.

  • IntelliSense displays XML documentation comments as you type.

For more information, see Creating and Using IntelliSense Code Snippets.

With Visual Studio 2010, you can package and publish your Web application in one click. 

• Creating Web packages

  The Web Deployment Tool, also known as MSDeploy, enables you to package your Web application for deployment to an Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server. A Web package is a .zip file or a folder structure that includes everything a Web server needs to host your application. It contains Web content, IIS settings, database scripts, components, registry settings, and certificates. The Web Deployment Tool has been integrated into Visual Studio and enables you to create Web packages with one click. For more information, see Walkthrough: Web Packaging For IIS Deployment.

• One-Click Publish

  You can now publish to a server by using the Web Deployment Tool, FTP, folder copying, or FrontPage Server Extensions in one click. Visual Studio stores all the setting information, such as publish method, server information, and user credentials. For more information, see Walkthrough: Creating a One-Click Publish Profile.

• Web Configuration Transformations

  You can now configure your project to transform the web.config file during deployment. When you deploy the project, the settings in web.config automatically match the settings on your debug, staging, and production servers. For more information, see Walkthrough: Using Web.config Transformation When Deploying a Web Application.

For more information, see ASP.NET Web Application Projects Deployment Overview.

Visual Studio 2010 also includes new features for ASP.NET and support for MVC-Based Web applications. For more information, see What's New in ASP.NET 4 Beta 2 and Visual Web Developer.

In Visual Studio 2008, the designer support for Silverlight projects was limited to a read-only Preview window. In Visual Studio 2010, the designer support is the same for Silverlight as it is for WPF projects. For example, in Silverlight projects you can now select and position items with the mouse on the designer surface. For more information, see Windows Presentation Foundation in Visual Studio.

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. For more information, see Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio.

The debugger in Visual Studio 2010 includes the WPF Tree visualizer, which displays WPF objects in a more useful way. When you invoke the visualizer on a WPF object from the Watch window, you see the object displayed as a tree and a list of properties. For more information, see How to: Use the WPF Tree Visualizer.

A number of improvements have been made to make the Visual C++ IDE more responsive, especially when you work with very large applications. Many IDE components, such as the IntelliSense engine, now parse and process files in the background. You no longer have to wait for Visual Studio to re-process the whole project every time that you modify a header file, switch between project elements, or reconfigure your project from debug to release.

The new IntelliSense is more accurate because it handles advanced C++ code constructs and conditionally defined macros that the old version could not handle.

In Visual Studio 2010, Visual C++ projects can target either the toolset in Visual Studio 2010 or the toolset in Visual Studio 2008. This enables you to take advantage of the IDE enhancements in Visual Studio 2010 while you continue to use an older version of the Visual C++ libraries and compiler. To switch between toolsets, you are only required to change one property in your project file. For more information, see General Property Page (Project).

Visual C++ projects use a new file format (.vcxproj) that replaces the old format (.vcproj). To build projects, you now use MSBuild.exe instead of VCBuild.exe. MSBuild, which is the build platform for Microsoft, provides several benefits, including better diagnostics, extensibility, and integration. For more information, see MSBuild (Visual C++).

Visual Studio now supports the restart manager in Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) applications. The restart manager is a Windows Vista feature that protects users against accidental data loss by regularly saving open documents. If your application stops unexpectedly, the restart manager restarts the application and gives the user the option of restoring the automatically saved data. You can add this functionality to an existing application by adding just one line of code and recompiling. By using the restart manager, you can greatly reduce the chances of accidental data loss in your applications. For more information, see How to: Add Restart Manager Support.

The Visual C++ compiler introduces five new features to support the C++0x standard: lambda expressions, rvalue references, compile-time assertions, expression type discovery, and automatic type deduction. For more information, see What's New in Visual C++ 2010.

.NET Framework 4 includes new libraries that support task and data parallelism, a parallel implementation of LINQ to Objects called Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ), and various new data types for synchronization and concurrency. These libraries rely on a new task scheduler that is integrated with the .NET thread pool. For more information, see Parallel Programming in the .NET Framework.

The C runtime library now includes the Concurrency Runtime, which is a concurrent programming infrastructure for C++. For more information, see Concurrency Runtime.

The following are some tool enhancements that support parallel computing.

• Debugging

  The debugger includes new Tasks and Multi Stack windows that enable you to do the following:

  • View a list of Task instances that are running in an application.

  • View the call stacks for Task instances.

  • Navigate to code from the debugger.

For more information, see Parallel Diagnostic Tools.