14 DAY TRIAL // The first Release Candidate Builds of Microsoft’s next generation development platform and tools are currently available for download. At the start of this week, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate and .Net Framework 4 Release Candidate, but opened access only to subscribers of the Microsoft Developer Community. At the time of this article, both Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4 are up for grabs for MSDN subscribers. Starting tomorrow, February 10, 2010, Microsoft will offer the RC development milestones of VS 2010 and .NET 4 to the general public.
“The primary motivation behind releasing a public RC was to ensure that we could get broad testing and feedback on the performance and stability work we’ve been doing since the last public VS 2010 Beta 2 release,” revealed Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform. “Over the last few months we’ve been releasing interim builds to a small set of folks who have been helping us validate fixes and measure very large projects and solutions. The feedback from them has been extremely positive the last few weeks – which is why we are now opening up today’s build to a much wider set of people to people to try out.”
Feedback is essential for VS 2010 and .NET 4 to reach the final stage in development, namely RTM (release to manufacturing). There are a variety of ways that early adopters testing the Release Candidates can contribute, including sending messages directly to Guthrie. Microsoft has also published a survey designed to let testers send their input on the new versions of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.
“Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix. If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu at microsoft.com) with details about it. I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation),” Guthrie added.