Via the Microsoft Download Center

Feb 10, 2010 08:10 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has already made the first and only Release Candidate milestone of its next generation development platform and tools available for download. MSDN subscribers have been able to grab Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4 RC since February 8th, 2010, with the Redmond company making its way to general availability for the two releases. At the same time, a variety of resources and solutions designed to integrate or enhance Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 are being upgraded in order to keep up with the RC update. Case in point: Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Samples for .NET Framework 4 RC. (download link)

The samples are designed to “provide instruction on various aspects of WCF: Basic - Shows samples that illustrate basic WCF functionality. Extensibility - Shows samples that are related to the discovery feature. Scenario - Demonstrates a WCF scenario,” Microsoft revealed. And the same is valid for WF Samples, which provide: “Application (Samples) - Provides samples that are related to workflow applications. Basic - Provides samples that demonstrate basic Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) functionality. Scenario - Provides examples of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) scenarios.”

The WCF and WF Samples for .NET Framework 4 RC obviously require the latest development milestone of .NET Framework 3.5’s successor. Developers without an MSDN subscription will not have to wait all that long before getting their hands on .NET 4 RC. In fact, later today, February 10, Microsoft will open up both Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4 RC to the general public.

“We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses. In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product. Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load,” revealed Jason Zander, the general manager for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft.

It was specifically because of performance issues that Microsoft postponed the GA deadline for VS 2010 and .NET 4 from March 22nd to April 12, and decided to make available the RC milestone.