The first Visual Studio (hereafter simply VS) came out in 2000. It was called VS6 and included Visual Basic and C++. By then, however, .NET had slowly started to enter the scene as a new platform for application development. Along with its grand launch, Visual Studio.NET began to spread as well.
At first it came as version 2002 for .NET 1.0, and a year later as 2003, which used .NET version 1.1. That release brought no new features; it only fixed the most visible problems. Amid huge anticipation, VS05 was released in 2005, built on .NET runtime 2.0. The areas that saw improvements were mainly building pages in ASP.NET.
At the same time came the Express Editions, which are free IDEs for individual languages. Following them in convoy, hand in hand, came other development tools; to name just a few, the Xna Framework, Sql Express and others. 2 years later, this time in honor of the release of Vista, .NET 3.0 was released, which introduced several new concepts used by Vista.
Specifically, these were WCF, WPF and others. These are new technologies that mimic existing technologies but are built on different foundations, so they do not clash with each other. WPF in particular deserves a lot of attention, and I expect that future versions of programs from MS will be built entirely on it.
To develop in these areas, you had to install a plugin into VS05, because the new version was still in development; it saw the light of day in 2008, and the VS was named the same way, i.e. VS 2008. Around this time, precisely because of WPF, MS introduced more tools for working with graphics, especially Expression.
SilverLight also began to fully establish itself; it is the answer from MS to Macromedia Flash, which is the king of video on the web, especially thanks to youtube and similar services. In 2010, VS will gain a new programming language, perhaps following J#, which was dropped in 2008: namely F#. If you are not familiar with this language, you may be wondering why ‘F’ of all letters.
It is the first letter of “functional”, which is the main feature of this language. Most languages today are OOP-based, that is, built on classes; this language goes back to the old days, yet at the same time it keeps up with the times and is based on .NET.
It is a language purely from MS and can probably expect strong support. A great move by MS is also the release of light versions of VS, i.e. ones that contain no language at all, but you can add one via a plugin.
More information on Wiki in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio