Visual Studio 2010 and .net 4 Beta 1 Released

This week saw the release of the latest tools for developers from Microsoft. MSDN subscripbers (and next week joe public) are able to download the first beta release of their Visual Studio 2010 product which ships with the latest version of the .net framework (4).

Unlike Visual Studio 2008 and .net framework 3.5 SP1 the buzz hasn’t been quite so great as Microsoft gave us a lot of new features which most of the industry are yet to embrace yet. Despite this MS are ahead of their previously stated 3 year roll our schedule, which can only be a good thing.

The new features include:

Visual Studio 2010

  • A new Windows Presentation Foundation-based (WPF) text editor
  • More “modern,” with more of a WPF look and feel throughout the suite
  • Smaller in size (in code and data) than Visual Studio 2008
  • More reliable and modular
  • Frameword 4.0 improvements

Programming Languages

  • Common Language Runtime (CLR)
  • Base Class Libraries
  • Networking
  • Web
  • Client
  • Data
  • Communications
  • Workflow

Just means that us dev’s who have been supporting .net 1.1 and .net 2.0 applications had better pull our certification fingers out as we have a lot of upgrade paths to follow!