Yesterday was an exciting one for all sorts of developers around the world. Visual Studio 2010 got available for both MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers.
First time I installed VS2010 was in the RC form mainly because of WP7 Developer’s Tools and XNA4.0 but haven’t made many investment in searching for new features.
But being available at Dreamspark I downloaded the Professional version and decided to try it out a bit.
On a side note to WP7 developers, if you are using VS RC to develop application to the phone don’t install the RTM version of VS2010 since it’s not compatible with WP7 developer tools yet. You have to stick with the RC for now.
Booting the new VS we get a nice splash screen
The new UI looks really clean and pretty.
The new Code Editor allows zooming in and out of code. For those days were your eyes are already red from trying to read so much tiny code. Sure you can always change the font size but doing this on the fly is way better.
One feature that I would never remember on asking but it’s really handy is Code Selection Block, basically by pressing the Alt Key and making a selection around a block of code, like this:
See how just Vector3 is selected?
Now start changing that block to something else
And voila, you are changing that block of code on the fly 😀 This works for copy paste as well. I’m pretty convinced this allows other stuff too but can’t figure out more usages.
Now, for the new intellisense. It’s not just plain dumb anymore, It won’t search just Classes/Members starting with the letters you typed, it will actively search patterns as well.
Multi Monitor FTW
Just drag and drop your files to another screen and there you go, multi monitor support. No more opening another instance of Visual Studio to do this 😀
I know there’s tons of other stuff but that’s what I uncovered so far. Know any more stuff? Please do tell.
awesome David!
you can also change the text size by pressing CTRL and moving the middle mouse button, if i’m not wrong…
also the plugin system is now integrated in the IDE.
there’s no need to open your browser and search for plugins, since now you can do it directly from VS.
Besides the UI, the development environment for C++ apps also suffered a huge update!
Intellisense is much more powerful and the project’s configuration menu got a lot more human-understandable.
One new feature, also for C++ environment, is that it detects code’s errors while you’re typing!
This is not new for C# environment, but it is a huge leap for those who use C++ daily ( like me ).
It saves A LOT of compile time! This really makes the difference if you’re project gets big!
Can’t wait to spend some days in front of my pc coding in VS2010 🙂
wow, the c++ improvements sounds awesome, I have to try them out. Been a little off C++ lately but it’s one of those things I always miss. Direct access to memory is a must 😀
Thanks for the tips