Visual Studio 2010 or VS 2010 is one of the powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) ever developed by Microsoft. Even though the beta version was a big hit, testers reported sluggish performance compared to VS2008, buggy or missing functionality, issues with memory consumption and stability concerns. Those issues caused Microsoft to push back the intended March launch event, and release the public RC build.

Testers who downloaded Release Candidate version have reported good feedback and indicated that it is much more faster and has lot of performance improvements. The VS2010 launch event, planned for April 12 at DevConnections, is not confirmed as the date of the VS2010/.NET 4 RTM, although Microsoft would like to release the new development environment in that timeframe. The timing of the RTM “partly depends” on the developer feedback that Microsoft receives on the VS2010/ .NET 4 RC, according to Guthrie.

In VS2010 Beta 2, many developers reported issues when working with XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. The VS2010 RC supports Silverlight 3.0 apps. Silverlight 4.0, still in beta, is not supported in this release.

“We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop,” explained Guthrie. “If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now.”

The VS2010 RC can be installed on machines with VS2005 and VS2008, but you need to remove VS2010 Beta 2 and .NET 4 Beta 2, according to Microsoft. MSDN subscribers can download the RC of VS2010 and .NET 4 here.

Microsoft is also working with companies that supply widely used third-party add-ins—ReSharper, CodeRush and Whole Tomato– to ensure that the tooling works as advertised in the new IDE. “We’ve still got more work to do here but are making great progress,” said Zander.

Right now the downloads are available only to MSDN subscribers. Starting Wednesday (Feb 10th) everyone will be able to download them (regardless of whether you are a MSDN subscriber or not).

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