My expectations were justified – it was the most interesting part of conference “Microsoft DevDays“: the presentation of the first demo of Visual Studio Team System 2010.

Approximately in a year we’ll be able to see all new features ourselves, but now only announcements and demos. According to the company official information it will be the largest release in the history. All graphic interfaces will be rewritten using WPF. That will allow to accelerate work of visual editors and to reduce the size of required free space. By the way, rumors that the installation will require 75 Gb of disk space, are just rumors.

Shortly about the basic features and improvements of the new version:

VS environments:

• WPF-based editors as was mentioned above;
• Better multi-monitor support.

Navigator:

• Quick search;
• Highlight references.

Project system:

• 100% search code compatible;
• Multi targeting (VS 2010 allows to develop applications for .Net Framework 2.0, 3.5, 4.0).

Web Development:

• Javascript full support (including jQuery);
• HTML snippets;
• New MVC and Dynamic Data tooling;
• Integrated web deployment.

Office development;

Sharepoint development:

• SP tooling for common customizations.

Debugger:

• Richer platform support;
• Breakpoint improvements (grouping and labeling, import/export);
• Historical debugger (record & playback of application exceptions).

Among features which will be useful for testers, are the following:

• Bug generation under information of test cases;
• Automated user interface testing;
• Application exceptions recording & playback.

Also Visual Studio Team System 2010 will be integrated with UML-diagrams:

• Documentation creation;
• Code generation using diagrams;
• Documentation/model generation.

Beta1 will be released in the second quarter of 2009, Beta2 – in the third quarter of 2009, and final release is planned on the end of 2009.