14 DAY TRIAL // After releasing the testing bits for the first major upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 to MSDN subscribers earlier this week, Microsoft has also given the green light to the public Beta of Service Pack 1 (SP1). Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta is now live on the Microsoft Download Center, where early adopters can grab it and start testing.
There are two downloads available, and testers will need to select the one that’s best suited to their needs.
The software giant is providing them with both a web installer designed to download and install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta as well as with an alternative (ISO) download.
The SP1 Beta is set up to integrate seamlessly with all editions of Visual Studio 2010, including Express, Professional, Premium, Ultimate SKUs.
“Since the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 earlier this year and our subsequent Feature Packs, we have been concentrating on your feedback and worked hard on the issues you reported through Connect and our survey,” revealed Jason Zander, corporate vice president for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft.
“Service Pack 1 (SP1) continues that momentum of focusing on improving the developer experience by addressing some of the most requested features like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, and including Silverlight 4 Tools in the box,” Zander added.
There are some issues that early adopters need to be aware of if they plan to test drive Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta.
Current testers of “ASP.NET MVC 3 RC” that will also deploy VS2010 SP1 Beta will find that the process breaks Razor IntelliSense.
The promise from Microsoft is that an “ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2” installer will be offered next Monday which will enable in-place upgrades, while also fixing any issues that were introduced through the deployment of SP1 Beta so that devs won’t need to uninstall the upgrade.
Similarly, Visual Studio Async CTP installations will no longer work after the deployment of Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta.
But in this regard, Microsoft is actually recommending developers to stick with VS2010 RTM if they need to test Visual Studio Async CTP , until a solution, most probably an update, will be provided for the incompatibility issue with Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
Zanders also enumerated a few highlights of Visual Studio 2010 SP1, including:
“- Help Viewer - The new local Help Viewer is a simple client application that re-introduces key productivity features including a fully-expandable table of contents and a keyword index.
- Better platform support - Looking at support of platforms newly-available around Visual Studio 2010 release, we wanted to make small investments to upgrade our support for them.
Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (with a few updates to RIA Services) is now included in the box along with Silverlight 3 support, underscoring our commitment to that quickly-evolving platform. We’ve also made a number of other targeted changes, including some additional Win7-specific MFC APIs to support use of Direct2D, DirectWrite, and Windows Animation Technologies.
- Unit Testing on .NET 3.5 – today all unit tests are run under .NET 4. While acceptable for most users because of the compatibility work we did in .NET 4, this caused problems for some of you with .NET 3.5-specific dependencies.
- IntelliTrace F5 for 64 bit and SharePoint projects – you’ve told us that IntelliTrace is great, but you want to use it on all the projects you’re working on.
- Performance Wizard for Silverlight – Similarly, our performance profiling tools are very useful, but you want to use them for your Silverlight development as well. Silverlight projects are included in the Wizard just like your client projects today.
- VB Compiler runtime switch – This switch will enable Visual Basic developers to target their apps and libraries at platforms where the full Visual Basic Runtime hasn’t traditionally been available.”
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.