Happy Valentine’s (Early): Visual Studio 2010 RC is Available

vs2010logo The Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 is now available for download and exhaustive tinkering.  :) 

You can grab it off of MSDN Subscriptions site today, or get it from the public VS 2010 site on Feb 10th. 

Start here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151797

I’ve received a few questions from customers asking why we’re doing an RC so close to the (April) launch of VS 2010.   While we received a lot of positive customer feedback on VS 2010 and .NET 4, the performance of the IDE, especially around loading solutions, building, and debugging, wasn’t as great as expected.  So we took that feedback and worked more on Beta 2 from a performance perspective.  The result?  The RC release.

So while you won’t find many new features in the RC (again, the predominant focus was on performance), there are a couple niceties in the testing tools (Microsoft Test Manager) that I think you’ll like:

  • Compose Environment from running VMs (Lab Manager)
  • Links list in Test Plan properties (Test Manager)
  • Create any new work item (Test Manager)

We’re not exactly done with the feedback, either.  We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions (both bad and good) about this RC so we can make the finished/launched VS 2010 product everything you hope it to be.

Want to learn more?  Check out S. Somasegar’s Blog and Jason Zander’s Blog for more technical details about the RC.