And up for grabs

Oct 22, 2009 10:18 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft started shipping the second Beta development milestone of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 at the start of this week. At that time the Redmond company offered Beta 2 for the next iterations of Visual Studio and .NET Framework only to MSDN subscribers, but it opened up access to the general public. Not only to the Beta 2 downloads but also to resources designed to work in concert with the successors of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. In this regard, developers can now download Visual Studio 2010 Software Development Kit Beta 2 straight from Microsoft.

“The Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 2 provides tools and templates for building Visual Studio extensions. By using the Visual Studio SDK, you can build your own tool windows, create menu commands, and add extensions to the new Visual Studio editor and other features,” Microsoft revealed.

Of course Visual Studio 2010 is still far from finalization. However, the Redmond company underlined that, with the availability of Beta 2 it was entering the final stretch of VS2010’s development process. The final version of Visual Studio 2010 will be offered to customers come March 22nd, 2009. Still, devs that have traditionally worked to enhance VS should download the Beta 2 Build of the SDK and start working with the current releases of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

“The Visual Studio 2010 SDK includes project templates that help developers create tool windows, menu commands, isolated shell projects, and editor extensions. The editor extensions include text adornments, colorizers, and margins. The Visual Studio 2010 SDK also includes build tasks that help developers build and debug extensions. Building and debugging are managed in a second instance of Visual Studio named the experimental instance. The experimental instance provides a test bed for extensions without changing the primary installation of Visual Studio,” Microsoft added.

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 2 is available for download here.