14 DAY TRIAL // The next generation Microsoft development platform and tools will be made available to customers in the first half of April 2010. In this regard, the Redmond company plans to offer Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 three weeks after the initially announced general availability deadline, which was March 22nd, 2010. The new GA date has been confirmed officially by two sources from the software giant. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will be launched in tandem approximately three months from now on April 12th, 2010.
Of course, by that time, early adopters will also have the chance to test drive yet another development milestone of the technologies. Microsoft is planning to make available for download a public Release Candidate (RC) Build of VS2010 and .NET 4 next month, February 2010.
Rob Caron, the marketing communications manager for Developer and User Experience Runtimes and Tools at Microsoft, noted on his blog that “Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010.” A date which is supported by this blog entry: “Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, April 12, 2010. In February, there will be a public Release Candidate of both technologies to gather further feedback.”
When it released Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 in mid-October 2009, Microsoft noted that it had decided on March 22nd for the GA. In the second half of December 2009, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, revealed a small change of plans and the delay of general availability by a few weeks.
According to Guthrie, Microsoft postponed the release because of feedback from early adopter. It was tester input that caused the company to delay launch in order to build performance optimizations into both the next iterations of VS and .NET. The RC Build coming in February is specifically designed to allow further testing of the performance and virtual memory usage improvements that the software giant has delivered into Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.
.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.