Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 became available to the public last week.  You can go here to download the product as well as to submit bugs or provide feedback on a forum.

Below is a brief summary of the changes the debugger team has made in the product.  For some of these features, we will be making additional blog posts that will go into more detail.  This should give you a good roadmap of what to explore while you’re evaluating the product.

Dump Debugging

There are 2 major changes to dump debugging.  The first change is that when you open a dump, you are now brought to a dump summary page that gives you some basic details about the dump and gives you links to take some additional actions.  The second change is that we now support debugging dumps that contain managed code, provided that the application was using CLR v4.0.

Threads Window

The threads window has been completely replaced.  The new threads window contains functionality for grouping and filtering your threads, including the ability to search the call stacks.

Breakpoints Window

The breakpoints window now has functionality that allows you to label and filter your breakpoints as well as the ability to import and export sets of breakpoints.

WPF Debugging

If you have  a WPF object in your watch window, you can launch a Visualizer that will allow you to view your object and walk the tree.  There is also addition WPF trace information that’s sent to the output window.

64-bit Mixed-Mode Debugging

Yes, this is now supported.

Exe Debugging

The way that exe files are opened as projects has been simplified; it no longer has the same property pages as C++ projects.

DataTips

When you’re hovering over a variable to inspect it’s value, you can now click a button to create a “floating” DataTip that will remain in place after you move the mouse.

String Functions in Native Debugging

We now support a number of string functions as intrinsic functions while native debugging (e.g. strcmp, strlen).  This means that you can use these functions without a function evaluation occurring in the target application.  The benefit is that you will always be able to do these evaluations in the watch window or when setting conditional breakpoints.

Disassembly Window

The disassembly window has been rewritten, although the visible changes to the end user are minor – a few changes to the menus.