Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Released

Five months after the release of the first Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010, the latest iteration of Microsoft’s development platform evolves again.

The Redmond company has announced the immediate availability of Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2.

As it was the case with the previous Feature Pack release for VS2010, Feature Pack 2 is only available for download to MSDN subscribers.

Essentially, developers running Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN, Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN or Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional with MSDN will be able to grab Feature Pack 2 from the software giant.

Of course, with Feature Pack 2 new features have been made available to devs running VS2010, especially around testing, code visualization and modeling. You will be able to find a list of the changes introduced by FP2 at the bottom of this article.

According to Brian Harry, Microsoft product unit manager for Team Foundation Server, the Redmond company has made the Feature Packs for VS2010 cummulative, per the feedback it received from developers.

In this context, devs will only need to download and deploy Feature Pack 2 and also get Feature Pack 1 which was released in June 2010.

It’s also important to note that Microsoft will continue to catalyze the evolution of Visual Studio 2010. The company is already hard at work building Feature Pack 3.

However, details on Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 3 won’t be made available to the public until a few months will pass after the release of FP2.

Microsoft enumerated the new additions to Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2:

“Testing features:

- Use Microsoft Test Manager to capture and playback action recordings for Silverlight 4 applications.

- Create coded UI tests for Silverlight 4 applications with Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

- Edit coded UI tests using a graphical editor with Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

- Use action recordings to fast forward through manual tests that need to support Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6.

- Run coded UI tests for web applications using Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

Code visualization and modeling features (requires Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate):

- Use the Generate Code command to generate skeleton code from elements on UML class diagrams. You can use the default transformations, or you can write custom transformations to translate UML types into code.

- Create UML class diagrams from existing code.

- Explore the organization and relationships in C, C++, and ASP.NET projects by generating dependency graphs.

- Import elements from UML sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and use case diagrams as XMI 2.1 files that are exported from other modeling tools.

- Create links and view links from work items to model elements.

- Create layer diagrams from C or C++ code and validate dependencies.

- Write code to modify layer diagrams and to validate code against layer diagrams.”

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.