Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4 RTM Delayed, RC Coming in February 2010

Microsoft is currently hammering away at the next iteration of its development platform and tools, but it looks like the company will miss the initially announced launch deadline due to performance issues it needs to fix. The Redmond company was set to launch Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET Framework 4 RTM on March 22, 2010. The general availability deadline announced previously is no longer valid, informs S. Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft developer division.

Somasegar reveals that feedback from early adopters indicates a less than expected performance level and virtual memory usage for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. In this regard, Microsoft is laboring to resolve the problems reported by testers, however, the optimizations needed by the successor of Visual Studio 2008 mean that the software giant needs to push back the GA deadline.

“We’ve been doing an intensive performance optimization push the last two months that is delivering significant performance and virtual memory usage improvements across the product. The early feedback from a small set of customers testing interim builds since Beta2 has been positive about these improvements. We still have several big performance fixes in the process of being checked in that will improve things even further,” Somasegar said.

At the same time, Microsoft will need to test and validate the fixes designed to address the performance issues reported. In order for this to happen, the company needs a new testing milestone of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4, involving the broadest number of scenarios and machine configurations possible. As a direct consequence, early adopters will be able to download and test drive a new public preview release of VS 2010 and .NET 4 before the two solutions go RTM.

“The goal behind the Release Candidate (RC) is to get broad feedback on the readiness of the product. In order to ensure that we are able to receive and react to this feedback, we will also be moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back a few weeks,” Somasegar added.

Microsoft released the Beta 2 development milestone of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 in October 2009.

.NET Framework 4 Beta 2 is available for download here.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 2 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 are available for download via this link.