Here is a list of new things in Visual Studio 2010 for unmanaged development.
Visual Studio IDE:
- The editor has been rebuilt using WPF
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx - Ability to zoom in and out, using the Control key and the mouse wheel (a zoom slider control will not be available in this version)
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/02/26/visual-studio-2010-zoom-slider-control/ - Dock files (source code documents) on multiple monitors
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2008/12/18/did-you-know-how-to-optimize-visual-studio-for-multi-monitors-381.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z4y0hsax(VS.100).aspx - Highlight Reference, is a new feature that provides a visual representation of the references to a selected entity, without needing to use Find in Files or Quick Searching
- Inline Call Hierarchy, an improved call browser, showing what functions are called from a function, and from where that function is called, but also to easily navigate all callers and callees
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/12/19/code-focused-development-in-vs-2010.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/kirillosenkov/archive/2009/05/19/should-call-hierarchy-display-compiler-generated-members.aspx
Visual C++
- IntelliSence has been redesigned
- .NCB files are gone, the information is stored in an SQL Server Compact database
- Each translation unit (CPP file) is parsed only when opened
- Changes to code are immediately reflected into IntelliSense
- MSBuild support
- Building with VCBuild was dropped for MSBuild
- Easy customization of the build process
- Ability to target multiple versions of the VC++libraries (MFC, CRT) from the same project (10.0, 9.0, 8.0, 7.x) for all platforms (x86, X64, Itanium)
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/11/20/printf-hello-msbuild-n.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/04/01/vc-msbuild-extensibility-example.aspx
http://www.codeguru.com/columns/kate/article.php/c15857/
- C++0x new features
- Lambdas, auto, static assert
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/10/28/lambdas-auto-and-static-assert-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-1.aspx - Rvalue references
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/02/03/rvalue-references-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-2.aspx - Decltype
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/04/22/decltype-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-3.aspx
- Lambdas, auto, static assert
- MFC improvements
- Task Dialog support
https://mariusbancila.ro/blog/?p=222 - Restart Manager support
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/02/18/mfc-restart-manager.aspx
https://mariusbancila.ro/blog/?p=218
- Task Dialog support
- Deployment
- New deployment model for VC++ libraries
- Parallel Patterns Library
- Task Parallelism: a mechanism to execute several work items (tasks) in parallel.
- Parallel algorithms: generic algorithms that act on collections of data in parallel.
- Parallel containers and objects: generic container types that provide safe concurrent access to their elements.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd492418(VS.100).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd434652.aspx
Visual Studio Tools:
- Historical Debugging, Visual Studio can capture stack frames and variables allowing developers to step back in time and see what happened at some point of time and why
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Historical-Debugger-and-Test-Impact-Analysis-in-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/< br />
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/shair/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-2010-historical-debugging.aspx - Extensions Manager, allows downloading extensions from the Visual Studio Gallery, directly from Visual Studio
http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2009/05/21/visual-studio-2010-extension-manager/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293638(VS.100).aspx - Parallel Tasks – new debugger window
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2009/05/parallel-tasks-new-visual-studio-2010.html
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Debugging-Parallel-Applications-with-Visual-Studio-2010/
Additional readings: