Finally, long awaited Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate with .Net Framework 4.0 and ASP.Net 4.0 was made publically available on 10th Feb, 2010.

I downloaded and installed it successfully, and only thing I can say it is far far batter then its previous beta releases. Still i feel it is slow compared it to VS2008, but new features and new look are worth it. It took about 4 hours to uninstall Beta2, download .ISO file of about 2.5 gb and install VS2010, but process was smooth.

It has an awesome, new sober look and feel with WPF-based UI and improved focus on writing, understanding, navigating, debugging and publishing the code.

Gradually I see that Visual Studio is evolving as a platform in itself. One can complete all coding, modeling, testing, debugging, and deployment work without leaving the Visual Studio 2010 environment

New features in VS 2010

• Breakpoint labeling and grouping
• Parallel Stacks & Tasks Windows
• Improved Multi-Monitor
• Improved XAML Visual editor
• Extensible test runner & powerful testing tools with proactive project management features
• Azure, SharePoint & MVC Tooling
• Intellisence for jQuery
• New Extensible Editor allows editor to be easily extended to provide a rich and robust editing experience
• Online Visual Studio Gallery integrated directly into Visual Studio
• Support for 64-bit Mixed-Mode
• and lot more…here.

Links

• Official Product page at Microsoft’s site
• Trial Download of Release candidate
• Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Readme
• What's New in Visual Studio 2010
• Jono Wells’ tweets on VS2010

Note

I used MagicDisk to virtually mount the downloaded .ISO file.