This week, developers at the Professional Developer Conference got three gifts from Microsoft. One was the Windows 7, one was the Windows Server 2008 R2 and the other one was Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0. Even if Visual Studio 2008 was released only a few months ago, Microsoft developers already started working on the new version. This supports the transition from traditional clients to cloud-based services.

Corporate vice president of the .NET Developer division, Scott Guthrie, told the media that Visual Studio 2010 was built using the Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft’s library for rich visual displays. The program will offer features such as multi-monitor support, richer code-editing and richer code visualization. VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 will include programming models for adding parallel programming. This means multiple portions of the app can execute at the same time. Concurrency helps create native applications with C++ that execute efficiently on parallel hardware.

As for .NET Framework 4.0, it would feature enhancements such as multi-touch and Deep Zoom support, support for dynamic language runtime, as well as static programming languages like C#. CLR 2 and CLR 4 can both be loaded in order to load CLR-based apps from older versions of .NET Framework 4.0.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 will also permit a user to customize the widgets on the applications and add the Ribbon UI first introduced in Office 2007. The CTPs of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 are available for download from a common portal they share.