Simplicity through Integration
Microsoft believes the easiest way to increase developer productivity is to integrate developer tools with Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 provides further tool integration (compared to previous versions) that simplifies how you take advantage of popular technologies like SharePoint and Windows Azure.

Visual Studio continues to give developers tools required for modeling, coding, testing, debugging, and deploying applications.

Team Foundation Server
Team Foundation Server (TF) provides tools for coordinating software development within a team. It provides a centralized location for source code as well as a portal for managing work items, bugs, issues, and more from both an individual and a team level. With VS 2010, the features set continues to improve in the areas of testing, version control, software builds, and project management.

My favorite new features by category are:

• Testing: creating automated UI tests, 64-bit testing, replaying manual tests
• Version Control: the ability to visualize merges as well as source branch hierarchies
• Project Management: the ability to create task hierarchies using Excel

For anyone managing a team of any significant size, TFS remains a wonderful tool that allow you to track your code and manage your project as you see fit. Microsoft is also expanding TFS by making it available at the launch of VS 2010, for free, to any developers with a current MSDN Subscription.

MVC Pattern for ASP.NET
Model-View-Controller is a design pattern used to separate the presentation layer into three components. The Model represents the application logic, the View is the visualization of the data to the user, and the Controller handles the user input and performs any required actions. In VS 2010, the MVC pattern is available as a project template, making it much simpler to build with the MVC pattern.

Some of the benefits of the MVC pattern include:

• REST URLs
• Controlled HTML output
• More control over client-server interaction (better handling of state)
• URL optimization
• Simpler testing via the Controllers (versus .aspx pages)

The MVC Pattern project type is an alternative to using Web Forms but does not replace them. Web Forms remain alive and well in Visual Studio 2010.

Quality Code Ensured
The only way to ensure you deliver quality code is to test, test, and test again. VS 2010 helps you be proactive in tracking bugs and related issues with your code. New tools like the IntelliTrace debugger and improved automated testing tools help you isolate issues and shorten the time to deliver quality code.

Best IDE Ever
The Visual Studio team's focus on improving the IDE centered around improvements to help you write, understand, navigate, and publish your code. The remainder of this section provides an overview of the more significant new IDE features, at least from my perspective.

Intellisense is Smarter
Intellisense now comes in two different modes: Suggestion Mode and Completion Mode. Suggestion mode provides the same auto-completion you expect, but with a nice twist. The updated suggestion feature includes substring matching. As a result your listed suggestions include any member, type, or object that includes the typed text in the beginning, middle, or end of its name. It is so wonderfully useful you wonder why it wasn't included previously.

Intellisense Completion mode allows you to use classes and objects that will exist but happen to not exist currently. When activated, Intellisense still lists objects that match what you have typed, but you can continue typing the name of non-existent object without hitting the ESC key. You toggle between the two modes with the CTL+ALT+SPACEBAR keyboard combination.

When using Intellisense Completion mode, the Generate From Usage feature is something you'll use quite often. When you type member or class that does not exist, Visual Studio will underline it with a wavy red line. When you hover your mouse over the undefined member, a smart tag displays under that presents with the choice of creating a stubbed class, method, type, or property (depending on the context of the undefined item). Generate From Usage allows you to write your code without the need to leave the code you are writing to create stubbed methods, classes, etc., just to appease the .NET compiler.

Highlight References
Sometimes I look at my code and scroll up and down looking for a certain member reference. I do this because I find it easier than searching for it using the Find tool when I know what I want was just a few lines below my current cursor position. The new Highlight References feature highlights all instances of the currently selected member. It isn't the Find tool but it does help visual the usage of a desired member.

Navigate To
Navigate To gives you a quick way to find objects within your code and then navigate to them. The Navigate To window accepts a search string and then returns a listing of results that match it. When you select a returned item, the window displays the project name, file location, and reference line number. If you want to navigate to a listed result, just double-click. The search results support substring matching as well as Pascal case pattern matching. In the case of the latter, you could type "DC" in the Search Terms box and receive a result set that includes all references to "DemoClass"… or any other objects that match that pattern.

Multi-Monitor Support
Visual Studio 2010 gives you the ability to dock the code and designer windows outside the IDE window. This small improvement means Visual Studio finally recognizes that developers like to use more than a single monitor. Using VS 2010, you can design a form in one monitor and write its underlying code in another. If you have only a single monitor, the fact that you can dock windows just about anywhere is still very useful…especially when combined with Windows 7's window-docking feature.