Introduction to Visual Studio 2005

                             Introduction to Visual Studio 2005

 

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is a major new release of the comprehensive development environment for building Microsoft .NET.connected applications for Microsoft Windows® and the Web. This new version offers the following primary advantages: 

 

·         Radically improved developer productivity. Visual Studio 2005 contains integrated development environments (IDEs) for Microsoft Visual Basic®, Microsoft Visual C#®, and other programming languages, which include many features that make it faster and easier to develop software. These include edit marks, automatic saving of edits, improved rapid application development (RAD) features, and others. Visual Studio 2005 also contains improved graphical tools for specific application scenarios, such as Web page development and data access.

·         Development of Applications in .NET Framework 2.0

·         Development of applications that integrate with Microsoft SQL Server. 2005 Beta 2 or earlier  versions of SQL Server, and development of managed code that runs inside of SQL Server 2005.

 

 

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is the new version of the object-oriented programming environment used to develop applications ranging from traditional command-line or graphical user interface (GUI) applications to Web applications and XML Web services. The .NET Framework 2.0 base class library (BCL) supports backward compatibility with earlier versions and also offers some enhancements to classes to perform common programming tasks such as string management, data collection, database connectivity, and file access. In addition to these common tasks, the BCL includes many enhancements to namespaces that support a variety of specialized development  scenarios, including:

 

1.   ADO.NET 2.0, which consists of classes for efficient data access.

2.   System.Xml 2.0, which consists of classes that enable you to read, write, manipulate, and

transform XML.

3. Windows Forms 2.0, which consists of classes to develop rich-client Windows GUI applications.

 4.  Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, which consists of classes to build Web applications and XML Web

services.

 

Software developers with experience with earlier versions of Visual Studio .NET will find many productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2005.

 

Some of the most useful of these enhancements include:

 Edit marks

Visual Studio 2005 provides you with a visual indication of what has changed during the editing session. It distinguishes between the changes you have made that have not yet been saved and changes you have made during the current session that have been saved to disk.

Code snippets and code expansions

Visual Studio 2005 comes with a library of code snippets for common programming tasks. Code snippet is the name used in Visual Basic, but in Visual C# and other languages, it is known as code expansion. You can insert a code snippet into your code to achieve a programming task, instead of searching the documentation or code samples for examples. You can also create your own code

snippets.

Visual C# IDE refactoring tools

The C# IDE includes a suite of tools that automate many common code refactoring tasks.

Developers can easily rename classes, fields, properties, and methods, extract code into its own method, reorder or delete parameters to a method, promote a local variable to be a parameter, encapsulate fields, and perform many other refactoring tasks. The tools ensure that when any change is made, all dependant modules are also updated.

 

Visual Basic productivity enhancements

Visual Studio 2005 delivers a long-requested feature, which is the ability to correct programming errors during debugging and continue to run without restarting the program. There are many other productivity enhancements, including the MyServices abstraction. MyServices are a series of coded shortcuts that make it easier to find system and application resources. For example, code such as My.Computer and My.WebServices are programmatic shortcuts to system resources and Web service references respectively.