I am very happy to announce that Visual Studio 2010 is now officially available! The formal announcement can be found on Soma’s blog and you can download VS 2010 from here.

Visual Studio 2010 is a great release for C++ developers. Top reasons you should look at VS2010:

1.       Performance and productivity on large C++ source bases

First off, we completely revamped IntelliSense to make it more accurate and more robust on a large and complex C++ code. An IntelliSense parse of a core header file now only takes seconds instead of minutes. We also added new features that make it easier for you to work with larger sources. My favorites are: “Navigate To” which allows you to quickly navigate to any file or symbol definition from anywhere in your source code, and “C++ Squiggles” which highlights errors in your source code without having to wait for a rebuild. Moreover, with the move to MSBuild as the build engine for C++, you get more flexibility and extensibility in configuring and diagnosing your build process.

2.       Windows 7 support in MFC

MFC has been extended to add support for key Windows innovations. For example, we make it easier for you to add a Windows ribbon and design its interface using the integrated Ribbon designer. We also added support for key Windows features such as multi-touch, restart manager, high DPI and Shell preview and thumbnails. It’s also a lot easier now to add support for your documents in Windows search as well as integrate with the Windows 7 taskbar.  Oh, and if you’re a VC6 fan, you’ll love that we brought back the MFC Class Wizard (now with integrated search!).

3.       Concurrency

VS2010 provides new libraries and tools that make it easier for C++ developers to write applications that leverage the power of multi-processors. The new Parallel Patterns Library exposes a higher level of abstraction to dealing with concurrency than raw Operating System threads. It also adds new thread-safe containers (similar to STL) that can be used in a multi-threaded application. We have also improved the debugger and profiler to make it easier for you to diagnose concurrency problems.

4.       C++ language conformance

We implemented some key language and library features from the proposed C++0x standard that make it easier for you to write better and more modern C++ code. Some of my favorites are the ‘auto’ and ‘decltype’ keywords for automatic type inference as well as the support for lambda expressions (which works really well together with the parallel patterns library).

And the list goes on! If you wish to know more about the new features in VS2010 for C++ developers, check out Sumit Kumar’s latest MSDN magazine article here.

These improvements could not have been done without the overwhelming support of our customers. Thank you all for the feedback you have and continue to provide via Connect, the Forums, and this blog.

Craig Symonds

Visual C++ Group Program Manager