Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 new features.

Visual Studio 2010(Beta2) is an (IDE)Integrated Development Environment with new features  targeted for everyone involved in Application LifeCyle Management.

The concerns are separate but well integrated for Architects,Developers,Testers and Database Managers.
Here are some of the  new features listed in Visual Studio 2010.

Architecture Diagrams
VS2010 has got a new template called as Modelling Project where Architecture Diagrams  like UML 2.x diagrams,Layer diagram etc…. can be kept together. 



Call Hierarchy Window
Consider your application to have many functions. To know the hierarchical relationship between two or more functions you will first “Go to definition” of a function and  then do “Find all references” for other functions which it is calling and vice versa.
VS2010 has a new Call Hierarchy Window. Right clicking on a function will give you a view of who made calls to it and which other functions is this particular function calling.

Sequence Diagram
You can also generate a  sequence diagram from  code written by right clicking  a particular function.

Dependency Graph.
This is excellent. As a developer you surely come across this error “ Cannot find the required assembly file or dll ……….”. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a visual of the assemblies and the namespaces that your project is referring to .
VS2010 generates an excellent dependency graph and  you can easily track which namespaces,assemblies ,functions ,types and external references are there for your project .

Test Impact View
In unit testing you might want to know what is the impact of test methods on a particular function.
Right Clicking the function and selecting “Show Calling Tests”  shows a Test Impact Window. 

Performance Wizard
There is no point in creating a project which is eating your CPU cycles. You might also want to  check the amount of memory utilized by your objects. 
Multithreading applications do have concurrent execution of threads.
To get solution to above issues VS2010 has a new addition called “Launch Performance Wizard”.
This wizard after selecting the appropriate option will profile your code by collecting samples as your application is running. Once the application exits or selecting “Stop profiling ”option,  a report will be generated which gives you the performance related metrics for your application.
Code that I wrote surely was not CPU intensive,so just profiled  it for some seconds.But report is really self explanatory.
 
Silverlight and WPF applications.
This is what I was waiting for… Dragging  and dropping controls from toolbox  for Silverlight and WPF applications is now possible in VS2010.
StaticResources likes styles,datasources can be easily bound to the controls in the properties panel..
I guess this should be my next blog topic..

So go ahead and explore Visual Studio 2010.

You can download an iso image or run the web bootstrapper(which I did) from MSDN site.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx