Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 2. Visual Studio UI Enhancements

In Chapter 1, you read about the major product changes for Visual Studio 2010, and gained an historical overview of previous versions. If you have used any of the previous versions of Visual Studio, you will see with Visual Studio 2010 that Microsoft is adding more and more features, as well as enabling features for the free Express editions of Visual Studio.

This chapter highlights the major differences between the 2008 and the 2010 version of the product, but focuses only on the User Interface (UI) without going into greater detail about the features.

BASIC IDE OVERVIEW

Visual Studio 2010 does not have a piece that has remained untouched from the 2008 version. As you read in Chapter 1, this is because Visual Studio 2010 is based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and now all features and modules seamlessly integrate with the Visual Studio Shell without serious Component Object Model (COM) interoperability operations. The interoperability and communication between different parts is accomplished through a new component in the .NET Framework 4.0 called Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

Note

Chapter 8 provides more on the basic principles of WPF, or, if you'd like, you can read more about MEF, and how the modularity and extensibility work, in Chapter 6.

Exploring the Start Page

When you start Visual Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) presents a familiar screen to the user — the Start Page shown in Figure 2-1. The Start ...