Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Visual Studio service pack boosts support for developers

news
Mar 9, 20113 mins

Microsoft rolls out a local help viewer for Visual Studio 2010 and integrates Project Server with Team Foundation Server to enable teams to work more effectively

In a boost to its IDE, Microsoft this week shipped the final version of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, which offers capabilities such as better help support, as well as IntelliTrace capabilities for 64-bit systems and SharePoint.

The new local help viewer is a client application that enables developers to navigate the table of contents in a fully expanded tree control, look up topics via keywords, and use shortcut keys for access to features.

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With IntelliTrace, debugging is enhanced by enabling developers to see past events instead of having to infer them or restart an application to re-create these events.

Also featured in the service pack are Silverlight 4 tools, unit testing support for .Net 3.5, and a performance wizard for Silverlight, said Jason Zander, Microsoft corporate vice president for the Visual Studio team, in a blog post Tuesday. “We concentrated heavily on fixing issues you reported,” Zander said. The service pack went into a beta release stage in December.

MSDN subscribers can now access the service pack on the Web. A general release will be available Thursday. This week, Microsoft is also offering Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature pack, which enables Web performance and stress testing through the application lifecycle with unlimited virtual users. Visual Studio 2010 shipped about 11 months ago.

In addition, Microsoft announced the availability of Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack, which integrates Project Server for project management and the Team Foundation Server (TSF) application lifecycle management server.

“Integration between Project Server and Team Foundation Server enables teams to work more effectively together using Visual Studio, Project, and SharePoint and coordinates development between teams using disparate methodologies such as waterfall and agile via common data and metrics,” said S. Somaseger, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog post.

The TFS Project Server Integration Feature Pack is available on MSDN.

Microsoft in coming weeks also plans to offer a second beta release of Visual Studio LightSwitch, for developing line-of-business applications for the desktop and cloud, Somasegar said. The second beta will enable development of business applications for Microsoft’s Windows Azure and SQL Azure cloud platforms.

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Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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