I was reading Tim’s post over here with the same title as this one where he was suggesting that Microsoft may be underselling Visual Studio 2010.
I suspect that the problem is that VS 2010 is huge and there’s a lot of material out there but some of it looks to be published in small fonts and isn’t perhaps as navigable or discoverable as it might be.
I thought I’d highlight a few resources around VS 2010.
In terms of What’s New in VS2010, there’s a decent MSDN topic here;
which breaks things down into
- Languages
- VB 10
- C# 4
- C++
- F#
- .NET Framework
- Team System
- Editor
- Deployment
- Office Development
- Data Development
- SharePoint Development
- Concurrency Runtime ( i.e. C++ rather than Parallel )
- Extensions
- Start Page
I won’t break down all those topics but the .NET Framework one is worth breaking down although I’m not breaking it down in quite as detailed a fashion as the website does;
- .NET Framework V4.0
- App Compat & Deployment incl Client Profile & in-process side-by-side .NET
- Parallel Extensions
- Security Model Changes
- Code Contracts
- Primary Interop Assembly embedding
- DLR
- Memory Mapped Files
- ASP.NET 4.0 and Dynamic Data
- WPF 4.0
- Managed Extensibility Framework
- ADO.NET Entity Framework V4
- ADO.NET Data Services
- WCF 4.0
- WF 4.0
Some of those areas see incremental changes (e.g. WCF) whilst others are brand new (e.g. MEF, Parallel) and others have huge changes (e.g. EF, WF).
Channel 9 has a VS 2010 and .NET Framework V4.0 training course which follows similar lines – click the picture to jump to it;
in that it’s broken down into;
- Overview
- Languages
- ASP.NET
- Data
- WCF and WF
- Parallel
- Application Lifecycle Management
and that’s downloadable;
and Channel 9 also has 39 episodes ( yes, 39 episodes! ) of the 10-4 Show which you can find up here ( click the picture );
on just about every topic under the sun. Those episodes have great viewing figures and I noticed that the videos that have been most popular are;
- Welcome to Visual Studio 2010 ( 600K viewings! )
- A couple of videos around “Downloading and Installing” ( ~200K viewings )
- Code Focused Features in Visual Studio 2010 ( ~190K viewings )
and I think it’s really interesting that the “code focused” video does so well because it lines up with a personal view that these kinds of topics appeal to the vast majority of developers.
There’s also, of course, a tonne of material from PDC09;
I daresay there’s a bunch more places that you could go to for information and if people suggest them, I’ll add them to this post.
Mike Taulty 