hi petercli, and welcome to the forum!
generally speaking, you can write a plug-in in any language.
however, the AE API is in c/c++ only, so if you want to write in other languages, you will need to use some code in c++ to interface with AE, and from there on you can wrap calls from the c++ part to any other function you have in c#.
you'll just need to add some non .cpp files to your project.
in any case, start off from one of the samples from the SDK, and add your non c# code files to that project.
as for working with visual studio 2010, it's possible.
just make sure that if your resulting plug-in is dependent on external DLLs, that you're binding to dll versions available to your user. i don't know for sure, but i think vs2010 ships with newer dlls than windows7 does. (but don't take my word for it)
