Microsoft has started giving the public a taste of the next generation of its development platform and tools. In this regard, the Redmond company made available for download the first Beta builds of .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. After being released only to MSDN subscribers on May 18, two days later, on May 20, the successors of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 were up for grabs with no restrictions, as Microsoft had opened up the testing process to all, not just participants with MSDN subscriptions.

“This beta does have full setup available so you can provision it yourself. The product is designed to work cleanly with VS2008, however like any pre-release software you should be careful about using the product on your main machine. We are not (yet) opening the product up for general ‘go live’ usage; our goal is to get your feedback on the feature set and direction we are headed,” revealed Jason Zander, general manager, Visual Studio, Developer Division, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.

According to the Redmond company Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is designed to play nice with a range of Windows platforms. In this regard the software giant indicated that the bits could be installed on both the 32-bit and the 64-bit flavors of Windows Vista (all SKUs with the exception of Starter edition), Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and later, Windows Server 2003 R2 and later, Windows Server 2008 RTM and SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2 RC Enterprise and Windows 7 RC Ultimate.

“Designed to satisfy the latest requirements of developers, Visual Studio delivers key innovations in the following areas: Enabling emerging trends – with Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft delivers tooling and framework support for the latest innovations in application architecture, development, and deployment. Inspiring developer delight – Visual Studio 2010 continues the tradition by significantly improving the experience for all software development roles. Riding the next generation platform wave – with Visual Studio 2010, customers will have the tooling support that is required to create amazing solutions around these technologies,” Microsoft informed.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is available for download here.