Microsoft's Visual Studio software development system is getting a makeover. 

With the planned Visual Studio 2010 software development environment, Microsoft intends to offer a new editor based on the company's Windows Presentation Foundation technology for visually appealing applications. The WPF effort and other developer-related revelations will be aired Monday at the TechEd developers conference in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft said. 

"We're going to make Visual Studio itself, the application, a WPF application," said Mendlen. The environment will be re-skinned to offer a much more compelling user experience. "We're trying to help the developer feel great about the environment they work in." 

The WPF-based editor will offer an "unprecedented" level of insight into an application, presented in context with code in "a rich and easy to understand manner," Microsoft said. 

Developers already can create WPF applications in the currently available Visual Studio 2008 release. But the 2010 version would itself leverage WPF. The upgrade would arrive around late 2009 based on estimated two-year release cycles for Visual Studio. 

Also planned for the 2010 release is a code-focused enhancement called "generate from usage," in which code recognizes what the developer is trying to do and writes code on the developer's behalf. Inferences are made from code. This feature already is included in the Community of Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2010 released last week.