Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Released

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We just released VS2010 Beta 1 to the web for public download !!   This is very exciting as my team, the Visual Studio Platform (VSP) team, has made tremendous effort and new functionality in this release of VS.  My VSP team is specifically responsible for the new editor, new WPF based shell, MS Build, VS Extensibility, and more.  There are already many good posts out there about specific new features in VS (such as the post by JasonZ), so I’m focusing my post on the resources to keep your eye on as we roll out announcements about the new features.

One thing I’ll mention that’s new and you may not hear elsewhere, is that we are now sporting a nice new web download ‘bootstrapper’ for Visual Studio.  Express benefitted from this in 2008 and now Pro and VSTS use it.  The advantage is that you start of by getting the ‘downloader’ that is 5MB instead of the full 1.2GB product.  VS Pro/TS is made up of about 20 other major components plus the Visual Studio core bits, runtimes like VC Redist 10, .NET FX 4.0, SQL Express, etc.  If any of these are already installed, the downloader won’t have to download and install them.

Glossary: PM = Program Manager, VS = Visual Studio, DevDiv = Developer Division (where VS & .NET are made), but you already knew these if your interested in this post! :)