First Look At Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes VS2010 Beta 1 for a test drive and finds the upgrade promising, particularly with regard to improved thread debugging and a revamped UI. But the biggest enhancements have to do with parallel programming, Heller writes. 'I'm not sure that I've completely grasped the power of the new .Net Framework and native C++ support for task and data parallelism in VS2010, but what I've seen so far is impressive.' Heller points to intriguing parallel programming samples posted to CodePlex and offers numerous screenshots of VS2010 Beta 1 functionality. He also notes that the beta still lacks support for ASP.Net MVC, smart devices, and the .Net Micro Framework."

Comments

Re:More security?

[wzinc]

Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment

Actually, it kind-of does execute. Most controls, even user-created ones, have "design mode." That's a special view that gets rendered while you're designing pages or forms. I never thought about it, but it is just code that executes. I don't know if there's anything that prevents you from opening up an FTP connection or calling "del /f /s /q C:\*" from a control in design mode.

Re:More security?

[shutdown -p now]

As it says right there in the screenshot, the possible harm is from custom build steps.

To clarify (since it may not be obvious to those who haven't used VS, and, in fact, even to many who did) - Visual Studio projects are nothing more but MSBuild makefiles, which has roughly the same expressive power and extensibility as, say, Apache Ant. In particular, the build steps can include file system operations, and execution of arbitrary shell commands. By default, VS-created projects have nothing like this, and so the verifier lets them load without asking. But if the file was hand-edited to include any such things, you'll see the dialog such as one on the screenshot.

Top 3 features

[alphabetsoup]

Quite a bit actually. Personally for me, the top 3 features are:

• F# - Finally a functional programming language with a real chance of becoming mainstream. I personally would have liked Haskell though :(
• Parallel Patterns Library - An STL like library for doing parallel computation. For example, instead of the STL for_each you can use the PPL parallel_for_each. Combine this with lambda functions for best results.
• C++0x goodies - These includes lambdas, auto, rvalue references, etc.

Apart from the above it includes a completely new intellisense for C++, using the EDG frontend. All this in addition to the usual .Net stuff.

Re:Whatever.

[genghisjahn]

Allow me to introduce you too... http://www.microsoft.com/Express/ There will be VS2010 versions. It's not the high-end dev environment, but it does quite a bit.