Download .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC)

Microsoft has reached the final development milestone of the next iteration of the .NET Framework ahead of RTM. At the start of this week, the Redmond company made available for download Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4 RC to MSDN subscribers. As of February 10, 2010, the Release candidate Builds for both VS 2010 and .NET 4 are up for grabs for the general public. Early adopters can now access the .NET Framework 4 redistributable package via the Microsoft Download Center. The package brings to the table the .NET Framework runtime and associated resources and files necessary for.NET Framework 4 applications to be developed and run.

“The RC includes a go-live license for people who want to deploy in their production environment. Thank you for all the feedback you’ve sent our way so far. The goal of this RC is to get more feedback from you and ensure we’ve addressed the performance issues in the product. We have made significant performance improvements specifically as it relates to loading solutions, typing, building and debugging,” revealed S. Somasegar, senior vice president, Developer Division.

The Release Candidate build was considered necessary because feedback from early adopters indicated performance issues with Visual Studio 2010. The Redmond company has dealt with the problems reported by testers and is now looking to wrap up the next generation development platform and tools. According to the software giant, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will be offered to developers on April 12, 2010.

Jason Zander, the general manager for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft, assured testers that the proper 64-bit .NET Framework package for the RC has been made available. “The wrong file was posted on Monday but was quickly fixed,” Zander explained.

“The Microsoft .NET Framework 4 provides the following new features and improvements:
- Improvements in CLR and BCL,
- Innovations in the Visual Basic and C# languages,
- Improvements in ADO.NET,
- Enhancements to ASP.NET,
- Improvements in WPF,
- Improvements to Windows Workflow (WF),
- Improvements to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF,
- Innovative new parallel-programming features,” Microsoft explained.


.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.