Rob Mensching posted an announcement on his blog this week about the availability of a build of WiX v3.5 that supports the recently released Visual Studio 2010 release candidate.

You can download WiX v3.5 build 3.5.1419.0 or higher and start using it with the VS 2010 release candidate.

There are a couple of notes to keep in mind as well:

• Now that WiX v3.5 supports the VS 2010 RC starting in build 3.5.1419, these builds will no longer support older beta versions of VS 2010.  If you switch to this build of WiX v3.5 or higher, make sure that you also switch to the VS 2010 RC if you haven’t yet or you will not be able to use the Votive VS add-in.
• Only VS 2010 has declared a release candidate.  WiX v3.5 is still in beta.  If you encounter any bugs with these new features or have suggestions for improvements, please report them on the WiX bug reporting site or the WiX feature request site.  If you have any questions about using these new features or about WiX in general, I encourage you to use the WiX mailing lists.

As announced earlier today on Soma’s blog and Jason Zander’s blog, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 release candidate builds are available for download (today if you are an MSDN subscriber and this Wednesday, February 10, 2010 for the general public).  Here are links where you can find additional information and provide feedback to the product teams:

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate home page
• VS 2010 release candidate feature walkthroughs
• VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4 release candidate survey

For a while now, I’ve been maintaining a list of what version of the .NET Framework ships with each version of Windows.  The list has gotten longer and more complicated over time as new versions of Windows and the .NET Framework have been released, plus the .NET Framework is off by default in some server versions of Windows.

Today, I noticed that Peter Marcu posted a very handy graphical view of what versions of the .NET Framework starting with 2.0 are a part of what version of Windows, including whether it is optional and on or off by default when you install Windows.

You can check out this graphical view at http://blogs.msdn.com/pmarcu/archive/2010/02/05/which-version-of-net-is-built-into-windows.aspx.