If you haven’t yet heard, as of the end of last week Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta is now available for download for all users. Service Pack 1 Beta comes with a “Go Live” license which means you can start using the product for production related work.
Service Pack 1 (SP1) continues that momentum of focusing on improving the developer experience by addressing some of the most requested features like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, and including Silverlight 4 Tools in the box. Some of the additional highlights are:
- Help Viewer – The new local Help Viewer is a simple client application that re-introduces key productivity features including a fully-expandable table of contents and a keyword index
- Better platform support – Looking at support of platforms newly-available around Visual Studio 2010 release, we wanted to make small investments to upgrade our support for them. Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (with a few updates to RIA Services) is now included in the box along with Silverlight 3 supports, underscoring our commitment to that quickly-evolving platform. We’ve also made a number of other targeted changes, including some additional Win7-specific MFC APIs to support use of Direct2D, DirectWrite, and Windows Animation Technologies.
Microsoft has also gone ahead and filled some holes:
- Unit Testing on .NET 3.5 – today all unit tests are run under .NET 4. While acceptable for most users because of the compatibility work Microsoft did in .NET 4, this caused problems for some users with .NET 3.5-specific dependencies.
- IntelliTrace F5 for 64 bit and SharePoint projects – IntelliTrace can now be used on all the projects you’re working on.
- Performance Wizard for Silverlight – Similarly, Microsoft’s performance profiling tools are very useful, but if you want you can use them for your Silverlight development as well. Silverlight projects are included in the Wizard just like your client projects today.
- VB Compiler runtime switch – This switch will enable Visual Basic developers to target their apps and libraries at platforms where the full Visual Basic Runtime hasn’t traditionally been available.
Note:
- If you have “ASP.NET MVC 3 RC” installed, please be aware that installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta will break Razor IntelliSense. There will be a new “ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2” installer released next Monday that you can upgrade to in-place. If you’ve already installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta, don’t uninstall the Beta Service Pack, just wait until Monday and upgrade your MVC installation.
- If you have “Visual Studio Async CTP” installed, please be aware that installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta will break Visual Studio Async CTP. Microsoft is looking at options for an updated release that will make the Visual Studio Async CTP compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1. In the meanwhile if you need to work with the CTP you should stick with VS2010 RTM
Download Link for MSDN Subscribers | Download Link for General Public.
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