Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Now Available on MSDN

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for download on MSDN for MSDN subscribers, and will be available to the general public on October 21st. In addition, the new .NET Framework 4.0 is now available as well.

New Features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

• Team Foundation Server – Track and manage work items for your entire development team
• Application Modeling – Create code dependency graphs, sequence diagrams, layer diagrams, and UML diagrams
• Version Control – View source merges, branch hierarchies, and file history
• Historical Debugger – Tracks system state as your application is running, so that you can backtrack to the source of any errors that occur
• Performance Profiler – Measure, evaluate, and target performance issues in your .NET application
• Editor Enhancements – Better docking control, code zoom, box selection, call hierarchy, and more
• Brand New Start Page – Redesigned UI and new customization features
• C# and VB.NET 4.0 – Late binding to dynamic types, covariance/contravariance, type equivalence

There are of course many other new features in this release. For a full list of new features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, refer to What’s New in Beta 2 for Visual Studio Team System 2010.

New Features in the .NET Framework 4.0

• Application Compatibility and Deployment – Applications developed on previous versions of the .NET Framework should still work smoothly in most cases. Also, the framework now supports in-process side-by-side execution of different framework versions
• Parallel Computing – A new Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ
• Improved Security Model
• Core New Features and Improvements – Changes to diagnostics, garbage collection, code contracts, dynamic language runtime, tuples, and much more
• Networking – Enhancements to the functionality in the System.Net namespace
• Web – ASP.NET 4 provides many new web forms features
• Client – New features in WPF and the Managed Extensibility Framework
• Data – Improvements to ADO.NET
• Communications and Workflow – Improvements in the Windows Communication Foundation

For more information, see What’s New in the .NET Framework 4.

Completely Redesigned MSDN

MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network website, has been completely redesigned to coincide with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Check it out!