14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has wrapped up Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010 and is preparing to offer the upgrade to developers worldwide.
Today, March 8th, 2011s, the first wave of Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM downloads goes live, with the bits available to the Redmond company’s extensive dev community.
At the time of this article the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM downloads were not yet live on MSDN, but the promise from Microsoft is that they will be.
In addition, even developers without MSDN subscriptions will be able to get their hands on VS2010 RTM rather soon.
“On March 8th, MSDN subscribers will be able to download and install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from their subscriber downloads. If you're not an MSDN subscriber, you can get the update on Thursday, March 10th,” revealed S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division.
When I checked last, just a few seconds ago, MSDN was still offering the Beta of Visual Studio 2010, with the same release available through the Microsoft Download Center.
This will change later today for MSDN subscribers, with the rest of developers needing to exercise their patience a bit longer.
“Visual Studio 2010 shipped about 11 months ago, and we continue to work on it and respond to customer feedback received through Visual Studio Connect. This feedback has guided our focus to improve several areas, including IntelliTrace, unit testing, and Silverlight profiling,” Somasegar added.
Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM introduces a number of enhancements for developers, including better help with the new Help Viewer, IntelliTrace F5 for 64 bit and SharePoint projects, a Silverlight performance wizard, VB Compiler runtime switch, etc.
“While the Service Pack is mostly focused on improvements in response to feedback on Visual Studio 2010, one new feature I want to highlight is the integration of IIS Express into Visual Studio 2010.
“This is a BIG win for developers, since it means that no longer do you have to wonder whether your site will continue to work once deployed, whether you’re using SSL, or HTTP compression, the features you rely on will be there for you in IIS Express,” explained Andrew Duthie, a developer evangelist with Microsoft.