14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available the first Feature Pack for the latest iteration of its development platform. The Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack is now available for download to customers running Visual Studio 2010 RTM. However, access to the resource is not exactly opened to all. The Redmond company is offering the VS2010 Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack only to developers with an MSDN subscription. Brian Harry, Microsoft product unit manager for Team Foundation Server, announced the new extension to Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
“It is an add on to Visual Studio Ultimate for people with MSDN subscriptions. Over time, we’ll add more. We’re working on one for people using the new Visual Studio Test features and one for users of TFS. My hope is that we’ll ship about 3 a year. We’ll see how that unfolds,” Harry stated.
While the promise from Microsoft is that more feature packs will follow, the Visualization and Modeling add on is alone for the time being. The software giant intends for Feature Packs to allow developers to extend Visual Studio 2010 with new capabilities on top of what the platform has to offer. The Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack does offer a range of enhancements that would otherwise not be available to VS2010 customers. Harry enumerated some of the new capabilities added to Visual Studio 2010 by the first feature pack below.
“- C++ Support - as you may know, in VS 2010, there’s no support for C++ in our modeling tools. This feature pack includes the first installment of C++ support. It’s not complete but it’s a beginning.
“- UML Class Diagram Code Generation - In VS 2010, we did not include any capability to generate code from diagrams. With the feature pack, we can now generate code from class diagrams.
“- Layer Diagram Validation Extensibility - We’ve been getting feedback that people would like to extend the layer diagram with new commands, gestures (double click, drag/drop) and enforce additional rules as part of this process. This Feature Pack introduces extensibility that allows you to do just that. You can create new extensibility projects with these project templates.
“- XMI Import - This release enables XMI 2.1 import which makes it easier to bring UML compliant documents into Visual Studio. For now you will only be able to important documents targeting the subset we support.”
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.