VS2010 launch slips as Microsoft works on performance

Published: 01/03/2010 | Last Revision: 01/03/2010

The launch date for Microsoft’s much-anticipated Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 has been put back from 22 March to 12 April, after feedback from users of Beta 2 (see HardCopy News, issue 46) indicated concerns about performance and virtual memory usage. As we went to press an extra Release Candidate version had been scheduled for release mid-February.

Microsoft’s ‘Visual Studio Myth Busting Matrix’ page dispels some common myths.

In a late December blog posting Microsoft’s Developer Division Senior Vice President, S. Somasegar, conceded that the company “clearly needed to do more work” on performance, beyond the already “significantly improved “ levels achieved in Beta 2. The work was clearly done, as by late January another Microsoft blogger, ‘bharry’, revealed that since 4 January the company had shipped three ‘Super Limited Community Technology Preview’ releases to users who’d expressed dissatisfaction with Beta 2’s performance, and that 98 percent of them were now either ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ satisfied, with 56 percent in the ‘very satisfied’ group. Billed as the development platform for Windows 7 and the Windows Azure cloud platform, Visual Studio 2010 will feature Team Foundation Server, support for Silverlight and SharePoint development, lifecycle management and historical debugging tools, UML modelling and the new F# functional programming language. In contrast to Visual Studio 2008 it will be sold in just three main editions, Professional, Premium and Ultimate. See the supplement accompanying this issue of HardCopy for full details. • If you’re still confused by all the blog postings, rumours and counter-rumours surrounding VS 2010, Microsoft has helpfully provided a ‘Visual Studio Myth Busting Matrix’ on its MSDN Web site. Visit it at http://bit.ly/8YXKQh.