Debugger Canvas is a new user experience for the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture.
Debugger Canvas is the result of a collaboration between Brown University and Microsoft, integrating ideas from Brown University’s Code Bubbles project into Visual Studio. Features include:
- Step into methods on a canvas using the debugger
- Use the normal debugger features in the canvas
- Share a canvas as an XPS image
- Take snapshots of local variables so you can make comparisons as you step through code multiple times
- Add related methods to the canvas using Go to Definition and Find All References
Debugger Canvas at Microsoft DevLabs
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 is the collaboration platform at the core of Microsoft’s ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) solution that helps teams to be more agile, collaborate more effectively, and deliver better quality software faster. Project artifacts are stored in a data warehouse, and rich reports provide historical trending, full traceability, and real-time visibility into project status. This service pack fixes bugs and improves stability.
Download VS Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1
Web Standards Update provides HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1. It brings VS 2010 Intellisense & validation as close to W3C specification as possible in a Visual Studio extension. The most notable features are:
- HTML5 – Video, Audio, Input Type, Drag & Drop, WAI-ARIA, Microdata, Schema.org
- Browser API – GeoLocation & Local Storage
- CSS3 – 2D Transforms, 3D Transforms, Animations, Background & Borders, Basic Box Model, Basic UI, Behavior, Color, Flexible Box Layout, Fonts, Paged Media, Hyperlink Presentation, Line, Lists, Marquee, Media Queries, Multi Column, Namespaces, Presentation Levels, Ruby, Selectors, Speech, Syntax, Template Layout, Text & Transitions. It also supports vendor specific prefixes like –ms, -webkit & -moz.
Note that this isn’t an official Microsoft product release. It was created by Microsoft employees on the Web Platform and Tools team in their spare time.
Web Standards Update for VS 2010
Announcement, Features and Details
PerfWatson is a low-overhead telemetry system that helps Visual Studio capture instances of UI unresponsiveness and report them back to Microsoft automatically and anonymously. Microsoft then uses this data to drive performance improvements that make Visual Studio faster.
Here’s how it works: when the tool detects that the Visual Studio UI has become unresponsive, it records information about the length of the delay and the root cause, and submits a report to Microsoft. The Visual Studio team can then aggregate the data from these reports to prioritize the issues that are causing the largest or most frequent delays across our user base. By installing the PerfWatson extension, you are helping Microsoft identify and fix the performance issues that you most frequently encounter on your PC.
Download PerfWatson
Spec Explorer 2010 is a tool that extends Visual Studio for modeling software behavior, analyzing that behavior by graphical visualization, model checking, and generating standalone test code from models. Behavior is modeled in two ways: by writing rules in C# (with dynamic data-defined state spaces) and by defining model scenarios as action patterns in a regular-expression style.
Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.5 contains new features, improved documentation, plus over 60 bug fixes. It runs on the Visual Studio 2010 Professional level product and above.
Spec Explorer Home Page
The new March 2011 version of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes videos and hands-on-labs that cover the following technologies: VS 2010 SP1, C# 4.0, Visual Basic 10, F#, Silverlight, ASP.NET 4, WCF, Windows Workflow, WPF, Windows Azure and parallel computing. The kit now contains 50 labs, 22 demos, 16 presentations and 12 videos.
Download the Training Kit
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio — which includes the Windows Azure SDK — extends Visual Studio 2010 to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Windows Azure SDK 1.4 Refresh is primarily a stability release.
Download Windows Azure SDK 1.4
Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for its Visual Studio 2010 flagship integrated development environment (IDE). Visual Studio SP1 provides many new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes including:
- Stand-alone Help Viewer 1.1
- Silverlight 4 support
- Basic Unit Testing support for .NET 3.5
- .NET Framework 4 improvements
- Performance Wizard for Silverlight
- Visual Basic Runtime embedding
Download Visual Studio 2010 SP1
Full Description of VS 2010 SP1
Tips on Installing VS 2010 SP1
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 enables you to validate that critical requirements such as end-user responsiveness, throughput, system stability and scalability are met. By understanding the assumed level of risk associated with your application, you can now release your solution with higher confidence.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscribers now have unlimited access to Load Test Virtual User Packs for load testing applications with an unlimited number of virtual users, without having to purchase additional Load Test Virtual User Pack licenses.
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack
Microsoft has updated the free Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010. These are add-ins that provide very useful additional functionality for Visual Studio. New in this release:
- No More Extension Resets – This version of the Productivity Power Tools will be the last which resets the extensions.
- Find – Quick find & incremental search now pops up at top right-hand corner of the editor.
- Enhanced Scrollbar – Icons overlay the scrollbar to show edits, breakpoints, bookmarks, errors, warnings, etc.
- Middle-Click Scrolling – Use your scroll wheel to quickly scroll through your document.
- Organize Imports for Visual Basic – Sort the imports logically and remove the ones that aren’t being used.
Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010
