The first Release Candidate Builds of Microsoft’s next generation development platform and tools are currently available for download for MSDN subscribers. It will be available for public on February 10 (Download Link). Visual Studio Quality Assurance team member, Kirill Osenkov, explained some of the problems with the product:

“During Beta 1 and Beta 2 it became painfully obvious that the new VS had an obesity problem: it was slow, consumed a lot of memory and the worst thing, with enough modules loaded it stopped fitting into the 2GB address space on 32-bit machines…. In a nutshell, with a lot of new functionality a lot more modules were loaded into memory. Besides, we now had to fully load the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) at application startup. Moreover, there were all kinds of memory leaks all over the place.”

According to Jason Zander, General Manager for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft “We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses. In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product. Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.”

According to the MSDN website, the silent features of this upcoming development platform will be:

• New prototyping, modeling, and visual design tools enable you to create innovative applications for Windows and the Web
• Create a shared vision as a foundation for creativity with SketchFlow ,in Microsoft Expression® Studio , and Team Foundation Server
• Take advantage of new opportunities & capabilities offered by multi-core programming and cloud development tools
• Complete all your coding, modeling, testing, debugging, and deployment work without leaving the Visual Studio 2010 environment
• Use existing standards and skills to target a growing number of application types including Microsoft SharePoint® and Windows® Azure™
• Work your way through multi-monitor support, partner extensions, and a new editor.
• Use the new IntelliTrace debugger to isolate the point of failure within a recorded application history.
• Stay ahead of the curve with proactive project management tools including new reports, dashboards, and planning worksheets.
• Know that you’ve built the right application the right way with manual and automated testing tools.

“The primary motivation behind releasing a public RC was to ensure that we could get broad testing and feedback on the performance and stability work we’ve been doing since the last public VS 2010 Beta 2 release,” revealed Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform. “Over the last few months we’ve been releasing interim builds to a small set of folks who have been helping us validate fixes and measure very large projects and solutions. The feedback from them has been extremely positive the last few weeks – which is why we are now opening up today’s build to a much wider set of people to people to try out.”

“Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix. If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu at microsoft.com) with details about it. I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation),” Guthrie added.

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