Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) Available for Download

Having hit the last major milestone on the way to RTM (release to manufacturing), new testing versions of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 are now available for download. No less than three flavors of Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) have been made available to the public through the Microsoft Download Center, after, at the start of this week, they were released to MSDN subscribers.

Early adopters can now grab Visual Studio 2010 Premium RC, Visual Studio 2010 Professional RC and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC, all the downloads being packaged as ISO images. At the same time, the RC development milestone of .NET Framework 4 is also available for download.

“When trying out the release candidate you should first uninstall any previous beta versions. The major focus of the release candidate is Visual Studio performance. However, you'll also be able to try out all of the bug fixes in the framework that didn't make it into the last beta release,” revealed Nicholas Allen, program manager at Microsoft working on Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight, and other projects for the .NET Framework.

At the bottom of this article, users will be able to find not only the download links for the RC Build of Visual Studio 2010 but also an embedded video featuring Jason Zander, Visual Studio general manager. Microsoft decided to offer testers the RC development milestone of Visual Studio 2010 because the company needed to address performance issues that had survived past the Beta 2 build. In this manner, the software giant also postponed the availability of VS2010 from March 22nd, the GA deadline announced initially, to April 12.

“Rhe RC build is set to run through June 30, 2010. We expect this will give you plenty of time after our announced April 12th launch to upgrade to final RTM bits before the RC build expires,” Zander stated.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.