14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft announced the availability of its next-generation development platform and tools at the end of the past week. However, downloads for Visual Studio 2010 RTM and.NET Framework 4 RTM will only go live today, April 12, 2010. According to the Redmond company, developers will be allowed access to the final bits of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 in conjunction with the Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo launch event, scheduled for today in Las Vegas. Both VS2010 and .NET 4 bring to the table significant improvements compared to their previous versions, with Microsoft having offered early adopters ample opportunity to test the products through an extensive Beta program, which culminated with the offering of a Release Candidate milestoneearlier this year.
“We’re excited to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2010 with developers around the world today,” Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, said. “Customer and partner feedback was instrumental in shaping this release. The functionality of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 creates a powerful and unique combination, opening up new opportunities for developers to build applications that take advantage of new and existing devices, as well as emerging platforms like cloud services.”
Among the enhancements highlighted by the software giant for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is a new editor, built leveraging the Windows Presentation Foundation. The evolution of the editor now allows devs to stretch their work across multiple monitors. In addition, VS2010 has been tailored to Windows 7 in more ways than one. The development platform now comes with built-in support for Windows 7’s multitouch capabilities and the Ribbon/Fluent graphical user interface.
However, Microsoft also built Visual Studio 2010 to integrate seamlessly with SharePoint, to support Windows Azure, and the ASP.NET Model-View-Controller, but also Windows Phone 7. As the Redmond company already said, Visual Studio 2010’s core focus is to allow developers to build applications for multiple platforms, including the desktop, the Cloud and Windows Mobile.
At the time of this article, the downloads for the RTM (released to manufacturing) Builds of Visual Studio 2010 and.NET Framework 4 were not live yet. I also checked my MSDN account, and Microsoft still offered the Release Candidate Builds. However, the downloads are bound to go live later today, and I’ll make sure to provide an update when that happens, just keep your eyes on this space.
UPDATE: "MSDN will be updated with VS2010 downloads and details at 10am PST today," according to Scott Hanselman.
UPDATE: Download Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET Framework 4 RTM from MSDN.