Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Available

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available for download by MSDN (and BizSpark) subscribers today, with a more general availability starting October 22nd (NZ Time).

There are also some changes coming to the number of versions of Visual Studio and MSDN available. There will now be only 3 versions you need to choose from:

· Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN: the comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for software teams to ensure quality results from design to deployment.

· Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN: a complete toolset for developers to deliver scalable, high quality applications.

· Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN: the essential tool for professional development tasks to assist developers in implementing their ideas easily. (Note: Visual Studio 2010 Professional will also be available without MSDN subscription)

Scoot over to the Visual Studio product site to compare what’s included in each version.

The testing tools in Visual Studio 2010 are a personal highlight for me. So often you see testers discovering and logging bugs that then get closed as ‘No Repro’ by the developers. The Test and Lab Manager along with TFS 2010 allow testers to capture both screenshots AND full screen video of a bug which can then be attached to the bug report. Along with IntelliTrace (historical debugging) the developer then has the repro steps plus a historical stack trace and other debugging information. Have a look at Brian Keller’s Channel 9 10-4 video and Habib Heydarian’s blog. Nice.