Top 10 reasons to migrate to Visual Studio 2010

The release of Visual Studio 2010 is just weeks away and if your organization is typical, they will take a wait and see upgrade approach. Visual Studio 2010 has so many great productivity enhancements that it makes no sense to wait. The problem is most of the decision makers will not have had much exposure to make an informed decision so here are 10 reasons why you should upgrade immediately.

1. Multi-Targeting support. Many of us have code in multiple .Net versions and many of spend time switching between Visual studio versions. Visual Studio 2010 greatly enhances multi – targeting between 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0. In addition VS2010 can be installed side by side with Visual Studio 2003.
   
2. Call Hierarchy. If you've ever spent hours staring at a complex piece of legacy code trying determining calls made from it of finding callers to it the Call Hierarchy tool will solve your problems. Select the method in question and it will map all the calls from and to the method.
   
3. Zoom. What else can I say zooming in the editor is a great feature for working with just a single block of code or if you have old tired eyes.
   
4. Navigate To. Rather than using Find All Navigate to allows you to search on types and filters the list while you type you can then jump directly to the code you're looking for.
   
5. Highlight References. Selecting a reference highlight all instances in the method or class allowing you to quickly navigate between them.
   
6. Improved Intellisense. Intellisense now has partial string matching as well as consume first mode.
   
7. Add Reference Improvements. Anyone whose added references in earlier versions know how painfully slow it was to load. Now it loads asynchronously and starts at the "Projects" tab.
   
8. Break point improvements. Break points can now be labeled, imported and exported allowing you to save break point setups and even share them with team members.
   
9. Expanded Code Generation. Visual Studio 2010 expands the create method stub functionality allowing you to create classes, enums, structs and interfaces.
   
10. WPF Editor. What else can you say? WPF comes of age in Visual Studio 2010, the font clarity and responsiveness of the editor will make you drool.
    

These 10 items are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Visual Studio, there is some much more that greatly enhances developer productivity. Waiting to migrate to Visual Studio 2010 is like waiting until the 4^th of July to open last year's Christmas presents, there is no reason to wait.