I remember my first sight of Visual Basic in 1991. Although the language was interesting, much more significant was the form designer where you could build a user interface by simply dragging and dropping controls from a palette, generating event handlers automatically. Visual Basic rapidly gained in popularity, spawning an industry in third-party controls and add-ons.

Visual Studio 97 was Microsoft’s first attempt at a single development environment for multiple languages, although Visual Basic retained its own environment. Then came .NET, which appeared in Beta form in 2000. The brain-child of Anders Hejlsberg of Turbo Pascal and Delphi fame, .NET supported multiple languages, including Visual Basic .NET and two new creations in C# and J# (Microsoft’s answer to Java). Accompanying it was Visual Studio .NET which brought them all into a single environment for the first time.

Visual Studio 2005 added Visual Studio Team System, extending the toolset to encompass more of the application development lifecycle, and now here we are with Visual Studio 2010, and another big leap forward. In these pages you will discover how Visual Studio 2010 adds new languages in F# and through the Dynamic Language Runtime. In addition to Windows and the Web, it contains tools and frameworks to target Microsoft Office and the Cloud through Windows Azure, and to take advantage of the latest multi-core processors. This really is a version to ‘set your ideas free’!