Visual Studio 2010 CTP is available!

We unveiled a glimpse of the Visual Studio 2010 new features at the Professional Developer's Conference last week.  If you were unable to attend, you can download the Visual Studio 2010 Customer Technology Preview from here.  The CTP is quite big, it's 7 Gigabytes and includes Team Foundation Server features as well as Visual Studio 10 and the Visual Studio 10 SDK.

After installing the CTP, take a look at the Walkthrough document (How to use Visual Studio 2010 CTP.docx).  The document contains the walkthroughs of the currently working features inside Visual Studio and will give you a first hand view of some of the new and exciting things in the next Visual Studio release.

In addition to the walk throughs, we've provided several samples for extending the new Editor.  The Editor itself is built on top of the new Managed Extensibility Framework.  We will continue providing more samples in the coming weeks to help you learn more about the new Editor and the extensibility points available. 

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK is also buried in the documents folder under c:\Users\public\documents\CTPWalkthroughs\Visual Studio\SDK.  It is a bare bones SDK mainly for supporting the Editor walkthroughs.  We are still working on our plans for the Visual Studio 2010 SDK and have only shipped minimal pieces in the SDK.  We will have a fully functional SDK at our next release.

When you first launch Visual Studio, the first thing you'll notice is our new Start Page.  The start page is clean, not as cluttered as the old one, and provides a great starting point to create projects, load existing projects, launch the walkthrough, or send feedback.  We've kept the RSS feeds but have toned it down and it appears as a rotating banner on the bottom of the start page.

In the coming weeks, we'll continue to blog more about Visual Studio 10 and the Visual Studio 10 SDK.

Stay tuned. :)

-Quan