Microsoft has released the Visual Studio 2010 release candidate to the general public. This popular programming development environment has handy options to make programming easier in Visual C#, Visual Basic and Visual F#, among others. Among other things, the new release adds improved stability and speed compared to the previous beta versions. The announcement by Jason Zander, general manager of the Visual Studio developer division, looks like this:
Announcing VS2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC)
Today I’m pleased to announce we have shipped the RC for Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4! MSDN subscribers can download the bits immediately from this location. The RC will be made available to the public on Wednesday February 10.
We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses. In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product. Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.
Since then Brian and I have been doing daily stand up meetings with the team working through the feedback. We’ve conducted several private CTP’s with people who reported issues in order to validate the direction of the work. In December we made the hard call to extend the Beta 2 period to continue to drive improvements into the product. I had a chance to discuss the things we found and the work we did with the Channel 9 guys.
At this point we have sought out and tested all the projects we could lay our hands on. We’re making the RC build widely available so you can try it out with your projects as well. You can report your feedback through our survey site and any issues through Connect.
In addition to taking any final feedback from you, we are working closely with 3rd party companies that have popular Visual Studio add-ins (such as Resharper, CodeRush, Whole Tomato, etc) to make sure the environment works well. We’ve still got more work to do here but are making great progress.
Let us know what you think!
| Version number | 2010 release candidate |
| Release status | beta |
| Operating systems | Windows 7, Windows 7 x64, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP x64, Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows Server 2008 |
| Website | Microsoft |
| Download | http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx |
| License type | Conditions (GNU/BSD/etc.) |