Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4 Release Candidate Ships

The release candidate for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is available for download. The downloadable release candidate was offered to MSDN subscribers on Monday. Non-members can get it on Wednesday.

The RC includes a go-live license for people who want to deploy in their production environment. For more information, see “Going live” with the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate.

The launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 for April 12.

Visual Studio 2010 features capabilities for developing applications for the Microsoft SharePoint collaboration platform, Windows 7, and the Windows Azure cloud platform; .Net Framework 4 offers features such as a reduction in size.

For more information

For more information on the RC, check out Jason Zander's blog posting, Announcing VS2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC).

For more information about the key features in Visual Studio 2010, see Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4 Release Date Set. Key areas include:

• SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010
• Silverlight and WPF Data Binding in Visual Studio 2010
• Core Coding Experience in Managed Languages
• Native Development
• Parallel Computing
• Visual Studio Extensibility. You can get full access to the large ecosystem of extensions using Visual Studio as well as an online experience using the Visual Studio Gallery.
• Office Development in Visual Studio 2010.
• Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

In addition third party companies that have popular Visual Studio add-ins (such as Resharper, CodeRush, Whole Tomato, etc) to make sure the environment works well.

How to get started

You can get started learning more about the features in Visual Studio first hand:

• Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Walkthroughs on MSDN
• .NET Framework 4 Application Compatibility Walkthrough
• New Features in .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010, Beta 2. on MSDEV

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation