Microsoft has released a new beta version of the first Service Pack for its Visual Studio 2010 tool set.
The download of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available for download here on Dec. 9. The technology became available for Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers on Dec. 7.
According to a blog post by Jason Zander, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the Visual Studio team, “Service Pack 1 (SP1) continues that momentum of focusing on improving the developer experience by addressing some of the most requested features like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, and including Silverlight 4 Tools in the box.”
Other new features include a new local Help Viewer, which is a simple client application that reintroduces key productivity features, including a fully expandable table of contents and a keyword index, Zander said.
Visual Studio 2010 SP1 also includes Unit Testing on .NET 3.5 (not just on .NET 4.0), IntelliTrace F5 for 64-bit and SharePoint projects; a new performance wizard for Silverlight; and a VB Compiler runtime switch to enable Visual Basic developers to target their applications and libraries at platforms where the full Visual Basic Runtime has not traditionally been available, Zander said.
In a separate blog post, S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, said: “Since we launched Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 on April 12th of this year, it has been exciting to see the extremely positive response to the product. Within six months of the launch date, Visual Studio 2010 usage surpassed all other previous versions of Visual Studio based on usage data collected from customers who opted into sharing their usage data with us. This is the fastest adoption of a new release of Visual Studio ever, and we are seeing continued strength in the adoption of Visual Studio 2010.”
Moreover, Somasegar said Microsoft has released a new Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta. “This feature pack enables sharing project status and resource availability between team members using TFS and Project Server,” Somasegar said. “The feature pack beta’s ‘go-live’ license allows customers to deploy it in their production environments.”
Zander also noted that on Nov 29, Microsoft announced the final release of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This release enables developers to submit their VB applications to the Windows Phone Marketplace. Since the Community Technology Preview (CTP), Microsoft added support for French, German, Italian and Spanish.