Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is released

VS2010 beta 2 has been released. Go get it now. It comes with a go live license, so you can use it in production, and we will support it. You need to understand that it is still a beta though. The RTM date is March 22, 2010, so if you have a project that is going live around then, it might be best to build it with the beta than building it with VS2008. We have committed that there will be a smooth upgrade path from beta2 to RTM so you don’t have to worry about the proper retention of source code, and work items.placeholder_for_vid[1]

I plan on posting some unboxing videos soon, but I wanted to hit some of the top features (at least that I think are my favorite features).

  • TFS is now much easier to install. You can install on Windows 7, on a desktop PC, and with SQL Express. It takes about 20 minutes now.
  • There is a new basic profile with TFS that installs the core features, making it super easy to get source control and work item tracking up and running for your team.
  • There is a new code only profile in the VS editor. When enabled, all the toolboxes, designers, and properties windows are removed. Just you and your code. Love it!
  • Support for TDD. Intellisense now figures our what you are doing when you refer to a class or method that doesn’t exist yet, and helps you write that test first! Yeah!
  • Historical Debugging lets you wind the clock back, and see what happened.
  • Integrate UML modeling. This isn’t your fathers UML. The diagrams are dynamically generated. Think UML for as built, not UML design docs. The diagrams are interactive, letting you set breakpoints and debugging through them, and you can navigate your code with them. This is great when you inherit a strange codebase.
  • Multimonitor support.

It does safely work side by side VS2008, so you can download it and try it without worrying about anything.

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