Microsoft Visual Studio is an IntegratedDevelopment Environment from Microsoft.It can be used to develop console and GUI applications along with Windows Formsapplications, web applications, and web services.

The VS IDE provides three services: SVsSolution, which provides the ability to enumerate projects and solutions; SVsUIShell, which provides windowing and UI functionality and SVsShell, which deals with registration ofVSPackages.

The latest edition is due to be released next year. Visual Studio 2010, code named "Hawaii", is still underdevelopment.However a beta version was launched in May this year. The Visual Studio 2010 IDE has been redesigned which clears the UI organization and"reduces clutter and complexity." The new IDE better supports multiple document windows and floating tool windows. Besides C# 4.0,VB 10.0 and VC++, the ML-variant F# programming language will also be a part of Visual Studio 2010; as will be the M, the textual modelling language, and Quadrant, the visual model designer, which are a part of the Oslo initiative.

VS 10 will come with version 4.0 of the .NET Framework and will support developing applications targeting Windows 7. With the Visual Studio partner ecosystem, developers will now be ableto work with IBM DB2 and Oracle databases in addition to Microsoft SQL Server™databases.

It will have integrated support fordeveloping Microsoft Silverlight applications, including an interactive designer.It will offer several tools to make parallel programming simpler: in additionto the Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework and the Parallel Patterns Library for native code, VS2010 includes tools for debugging parallel applications.It will also have new feature named the Concurrency Runtime which simplifies parallel programming and helps us write robust, scalable, and responsiveparallel applications.

The code editor now highlights references;whenever a symbol is selected, all other usages of the symbol are highlighted.

Visual Studio Team System 2010, codenamed Rosario is being positioned for application lifecycle management. It will include newmodelling tools including Architecture Explorer, Test Impact Analysis and Historical debugger.It supports both Unified Modeling Language and Domain Specific Language support, so development organizations will have the right tool for right job.