Yesterday Microsoft released for its MSDN subscribers Visual Studio 2010 and. NET Framework 4.0 Beta 2.

 

Under Microsoft's liturgy, Beta 2 is a complete and usable product, but only with stability and performance issues. It also includes a "go-live" license. That means the software is supported and can be put into production under some restrictions.

 

Supposedly it coexists peacefully with Visual Studio 2008, which led me to install it on my real machine (not virtual) Windows Seven.

 

Among the many new features, I think the greatest thing is the excellent support for WPF and Silverlight. You can now develop  within Visual Studio without the need for another tool such as Expression Blend. In fact, the interface of Visual Studio was entirely rewritten in WPF.

 

I installed, used it a little and liked it what I saw.

 

Other features include:

 

The final release was announced for March 22, 2010. The availability of the final version can occur just before or a bit after it, depending on the final stages of development.