Team Lab Management Features
My company builds software solutions for its clients. To support the various needs of each client, we typically build server and network scenarios that mimic our clients’ as it just makes sense. We use virtualization to build these environments.

Visual Studio Team Lab Management accelerates the ability of team to setup and tear down virtual environments to various states for testing as well as for automating builds. Using Team Lab Management you can automate virtual machine provisioning, build deployment, and build verification.

The killer feature is how Team Lab Management can enhance testing. Testers have the ability to create bug reports that tie directly back to virtualized environment checkpoints. Developers can use these checkpoints to recreate the environment when resolving the bugs. I believe Team Lab Management will be a boon not only to consulting businesses like mine but to anyone looking to reduce the resource costs involved with maintaining complex environments for development and testing purposes.

Smattering of Other Features worth Mentioning
The features listed are those that I find most note-worthy. But the truth is there are many more features that might prove more impactful to your daily needs. For example:

• The Call Hierarchy provides a view of the calls both and to and from a given method. You can use this view to quickly navigate to related calls from selected method, property, or constructor. One caveat is that the Call Hierarchy is only available with C#.
• Toolbox controls and References auto-target to the .NET version your application targets. You will not see controls and references that are not supported by the targeted version.
• The Threads windows now supports filtering
• The Call stack allows you to group by category, name, priority, process name, etc
• The Call Stack also supports flagging (the grouping also allows you to sort by flag)
• Breakpoints are now searchable
• The IDE supports zooming; something I find very handy when presenting demos
• Click-Once deployments now allow you to target multiple .NET framework versions in the same deployment package
• Office solutions can now be deploy multiple Office solutions in a single deployment package
• Visual Studio provides new project templates for SharePoint and Cloud (Azure) development.
• All this and more. For a full listing of new features, see What's New in Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 is Built for the Next Wave of Microsoft Products
Visual Studio continues to be the best coding environment the programming has world has even seen. Visual Studio 2010 gives developers even more tools to make writing, understanding, navigating, and publishing code better than ever. In addition, Microsoft views Visual Studio as a platform and is investing in resources like the Online Visual Studio Gallery to encourage the Microsoft Developer community as well as Microsoft Partners to build and share extensions.

When I ran VS 2010 for the first time, it was clear that this version is not the same old Visual Studio. From the new splash screen displaying a new logo and color scheme to completely re-written WPF environment, it is clear that Visual Studio 2010 is ready for the next wave of Microsoft products, including the 2010 versions of SharePoint and Office, as well as next-generation technologies like Azure and Silverlight.

* This article was commissioned by and prepared for Microsoft Corporation. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.