If you’re looking for the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio, you’ll want to get your paws on the Release Candidate for Visual Studio and .NET Framework 4.0! It was made available to MSDN subscribers yesterday (if you’re an MSDN subscriber, you can download it immediately), and will be available to the general public tomorrow, Wednesday, February 10.
The changes in the Release Candidate (RC) are based on your feedback from the Beta 2 version and include improvements to:
- General UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs)
- Editing (typing, scrolling, Intellisense)
- Designers (particularly Silverlight and WPF)
- Memory usage
- Debugging (stepping, managed/native interop)
- Build times
- Solution/project load times
Here’s a Channel 9 video featuring Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander talking about how the Visual Studio team addressed the feedback you gave for Beta 2:
The team has tested the RC on all the projects they could get their hands on, but not all the projects in existence. That’s why we’re making the RC build freely available to you so you can try it out on your projects! We want to hear from you, so please give the RC a try and let us know what you think via our survey site.
In the meantime, the Visual Studio team is working closely with vendors who’ve created popular Visual Studio add-ins, such as Resharper, CodeRush and so on to make sure that Visual Studio 2010 works with them.
Update: An Extra Note from Scott Guthrie
Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix. If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it. I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).
