Yet Another VS2010 Overview

Today I attended a mediocre presentation by Paul Fallen which looked stellar compared to the atrocious overview put on at the Galway VS2010 Launch Event.  Paul had the look of a man who had seen these slides many times and glossed over them at speed.  In fairness, he was using the same presentation deck I’ve seen since TechEd 2008.  I think we had all seen several flavours of this overview by this time, so nobody seemed to mind.  Below are the few snippets of information to add to the smorgasbord of other snippets I’ve gleaned from other talks of this nature.

Please click here for more comprehensive posts earlier on VS2010.

Here is the VS2010 Training Kit which was used in the demos.

• Common Language Runtime
  • Latest version is CLR 4 (to go with .NET 4).
  • Previous version of CLR 2 encompassed .NET 2, 3, 3.5, 3.5SP1
  • Implications
    • App pool .NET Framework version
    • Incompatibilities running CLR frameworks side by side within same process
      • Think 3 COM objects accessing Outlook all using CLR1, 2, and 4
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
  • Library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components
• VS2010 & C# 4.0
  • IDE
    • WPF editor – Ctrl + mouse wheel to zoom.  Handy for presentations
      • Box select (like command prompt selection)
    • Breakpoint labelling, import/export, Intellitrace (covered below)
    • Code navigation improvements (Ctrl + , and Ctrl + – for back)
    • Call Hierarchy
      • Allows you to visualize all calls to and from a selected method, property, or constructor
    • Improved Intellisense
      • Greatly improved javascript intellisense
      • Support for camel case
      • Can toggle (Ctrl + Space) between suggestive and consume first mode (handy for TDD)
    • Test run record, fast forward
    • Better multi-monitor support, docking enhancements
    • Tracking requirements and tasks as work items
  • Better control over ClientID
  • Routing moved out from MVP to general ASP.NET
  • Optional and named parameters
  • Improved website publishing, ClickOnce (see prev. posts)
• Parallelism
  • Pillars
    • Task Parallel Library (TPL)
      • He didn’t touch at all on the new task concept
    • Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)
      • These are the extension methods to LINQ to turn query operators in to parallel operations.
        • var matches = from person in people.AsParallel()
        •               where person.FirstName == “Bob”
        •               select person;
    • System.Threading significant updates
    • Coordination Data Structures (CDS)
      • Lightweight and scalable thread-safe data structures and synchronization primitives
  • Toolset
    • Debugger: record and visualize threads
    • Visualizer: View multiple stacks
    • IntelliTrace – new capability to record execution, play it backwards and forwards, even email it to another engineer and have them reproduce the problem on their box
  • Other
    • Eventual depreciation of ThreadPool as higher level abstractions layer atop toolkit?
    • Unified cancellation using cancellation token
• Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)
  • New feature in CLR 4
  • Major new feature in C# 4 is dynamic type
    • What Linq was to C# 3.5
  • Adds shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code
  • Big boost working with COM: type equivalence, embedded interop, managed marshalling
• Windows Communication Framework (WCF)
  • Service discovery
    • Easier to discover endpoints
    • Imagine an IM chat program or devices that come and go
  • REST support via WCF WebHttp Services
    • Available in the code gallery templates

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