Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 6. Introduction to Software Development

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• New Visual Studio 2010 features of most interest to developers

• Overview of test impact analysis

• Code analysis improvements

• Profiler enhancements

• Tools for database development and extensibility to support multiple database vendors

• Advanced debugging with IntelliTrace

• Code editor improvements

• Improvements to the "test-first" experience

Visual Studio has traditionally been the application to support development on the Microsoft platform with the tools to create and compile applications. However, over the course of many years, organizations often develop large and complex code bases. The code is typically edited by a number of developers as the application moves through the lifecycle, and the application also changes to meet the changing business requirements.

Soon, simply having the tools at your disposal to create applications is no longer enough. You need tools to help you to analyze existing code bases, and to help you to identify hot spots that might be causing you problems. You need tools to help identify the code with known maintainability or security issues. You need something that will help you make sense of this mass of code that you have inherited, and have confidence that not only does the application still work after making your changes, but that it is more efficient, and the quality of the code is improving as your team matures. This is where Visual Studio 2010 comes in.

Visual Studio 2010 is also very useful ...