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.”

Read the rest of this entry »