A Launch Event For Visual Studio

About 10 minutes ago I was told to sit down and open my laptop.  The event is about start, and the place is extremely crowded.  Barnaby Jeans is on stage doing the usual intro.  Twitter, blog, twit tweet tweet tweet #vs2010.

Sean Graglia hits the stage.  Today VS2010 and .NET 4.0 were released.  It makes you a little nostalgic about the old days of development.  The way things were done, the way teams worked, the way we tested.  It’s changed quite a bit since a quarter century ago.  We used to be proud of a user interface that worked on an 80x24 printout.  Notsomuch anymore.

We now need a new way of doing things.  Visual Studio 2010 can help us with this.  Whether we want to deliver to conventional devices, or things like the phone, or even the cloud, Visual Studio can help us from inception to release.

So here we have Keith Yedlin from Corp up to now discuss the value of 2010.  First up is multi-CPU.  .NET 4.0 has created the ability to easily multi-thread processes for faster processing.  That’s actually pretty cool.  Multi-threading applications is for lack of a better word, terrible.  It’s hard to do natively, its hard to do in Managed code, and it’s even harder to figure out what’s going on after the fact.

Now, that brings up an interesting thought.  Debugging can be tricky.  Visual Studio 2010 has introduced something pretty awesome.  You can now create trace files for the debugger, and while that’s not all that interesting, you can load that back into the debugger from a remote PC and run through exactly what happened.  That is pretty fricken awesome.

Team Foundation Server

TFS was first released in 2005.  It was tricky to use, and the learning curve was fairly high.  Oh, and it was bloody expensive.  2010 has changed that entirely.  It’s now easier to use, easier to manage, and cost is much more reasonable (read: free version - FTW).  This can (and does) easily translate into faster time to market, more bug/test coverage, and overall better code.  Win-win-win.

More to come.