Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 6. New to Visual Studio 2010

In This Chapter

• Introducing parallel programming and cloud computing

• Increasing productivity for development teams

• Accessing more databases

Visual Studio 2010 has been on the horizon for a long time. Even during the release of Visual Studio 2008, rumors of the next version (code named Hawaii) abounded. And now that Visual Studio 2010 is here, it's living up to expectations. This chapter talks about the new features, most of which are just about guaranteed to rock the world of Microsoft-platform developers.

Exploring Additional Programming Paradigms

There's always a lot of hype about technology, and most of it originates with the developers of the technology. The hype starts off with the developers, moves through managers, and then ends up with marketing. And it's the marketing spin that has delivered some of the most overblown technology promises.

I remember listening to news reports more than ten years ago about how object-oriented programming (OOP) was a major contributor to software profits. Don't get me wrong, I'm an OOP evangelist. But the effect of OOP on the bottom line was so exaggerated that it was laughable from my point of view. Yes, OOP saves companies money if managed correctly (and costs dearly, if not). But OOP isn't a reason for a stock to double or triple as some did in the 1990s.

In the following sections, I talk about two new paradigms that Visual Studio 2010 supports. Yes, there's hype out there about them, but these paradigms are ...