In October we shipped the public Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. The feedback on the new features in VS 2010 and .NET 4 has been really great. I’ve been working on a blog series about some of them (lots more posts to go!) and have also had a chance to present them to a broad range of audiences – and it has been great hearing the excitement people have about them.
At the same time, though, we’ve also received feedback that the performance and virtual memory usage of VS 2010 Beta 2 is not where people need it to be before we ship.
We’ve been doing an intensive performance optimization push the last two months that is delivering significant performance and virtual memory usage improvements across the product. The early feedback from a small set of customers testing interim builds since Beta2 has been positive about these improvements. We still have several big performance fixes in the process of being checked in that will improve things even further.
Public Release Candidate
In order to make sure that these fixes truly address the performance issues reported, and to help validate them across the broadest number of scenarios and machine configurations, we’ve decided to ship another public preview release of VS 2010 and .NET 4 before we ship. Specifically, we plan to make a Release Candidate build available in February that everyone will be able to download and test. It will be a public build and include a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment.
The goal behind the Release Candidate is to get broad feedback on the readiness of the product. In order to ensure that we are able to receive and react to this feedback, we will also be moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back a few weeks.
Please continue to send us your feedback about the product, as well as details on issues you encounter with the current Beta 2 release. Your feedback is invaluable, and really helps ensure we deliver the right product. Feel free to send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) if you have a specific issue you are running into that you don’t think has already been reported.
Hope this helps,
Scott