Microsoft Set to Deliver Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

Microsoft is set to deliver the first beta of the next major version of its flagship tools suite, Visual Studio 2010.

According to at least one Microsoft blogger, the company will release Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 to its core developer customers on May 18. Jihad Dannawi, a developer tools solution specialist for Microsoft Australia, said:

“On Monday, May 18th, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN [Microsoft Developer Network] Subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on Wednesday, May 20th through Microsoft Downloads.“

Microsoft is delivering a slew of new features in Visual Studio 2010, including tools for Windows 7 development; an “enhanced user experience”; SharePoint development inside Visual Studio; enhanced Web development capabilities such as a JavaScript IntelliSense engine, one-click deployment and support for Silverlight; cloud development support, with Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio; support for IBM DB2, Oracle and Microsoft’s own SQL Server database; support for parallel programming; and enhanced support for ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) through Visual Studio Team System 2010.

In a May 12 blog post, Jason Zander, general manager for Visual Studio in Microsoft’s Developer Division, wrote about Visual Studio 2010 enhancements that affect the user experience and performance of the product. For instance, in reaction to user feedback, Microsoft eliminated triangles from the outlining mode of the tool.

Said Zander:

“You spoke loudly and clearly that you didn’t like the triangle outline mode. Based on this feedback, the team actually changed this feature in mid-flight during Beta 1 to reflect your feedback: no more triangles!!“

Regarding performance, Zander made a list of tasks typically part of daily use of the tool and admitted that performance of Visual Studio 2010 is not yet ideal. Zander wrote:

“For Beta 1 we are making progress on performance but it is not yet where I want it to be. For example the VB/Windows Forms application is actually doing pretty well while the VB/ASP.NET application is slower than VS2008 (similar with C#).“

In the same post, Zander said, “We are getting very close to releasing Beta 1. Stay tuned here for the formal announce[ment] of the release and keep sending us your feedback!”