Visual Studio 2010 RC is available on the Web today for MSDN subscribers. Go to the RC landing page for details.

We have a very short window, just a few weeks, for incorporating feedback from you back into the product for RTM. Please install the RC today, so we can fix any critical issues you find in the product before RTM. We’ve already fixed a couple of bugs since the RC in the load testing product, generated from internal adopters of the RC. Overall feedback so far has been very positive – people love this release!

Between Beta 2 and RC we’ve made substantial improvements across VS, especially focusing on performance and reliability of VS.

We have been very busy since releasing beta 2. Of course we’ve fixed bugs across the feature set and also rounded out some rough edges, including:

Web Test Recorder

With the RC release, we now have addressed the most common problems as described in Diagnosing and fixing Web Test recorder bar issues. We have also fixed some patterns around correlation and hidden field binding in AJAX requests that we were not handling properly before.

  • Handle security context switches in IE7 and IE8 in the recorder
  • Handle process boundaries in IE8 in the recorder
  • Handle Window.Open going across process boundaries
  • Two pass hidden field matching (better matching for ajax requests)
  • Better dynamic field detection (handles cases where referrer not set)

Web Test

  • Support for binary post bodies, which includes a new option in tools-options-web test, and an extensibility point to override the form post body editor control. Customers testing SilverLight clients calling via WCF will find this pattern now “just works” in the RC.
  • Parameterize server command now handles urls in query string parameters. This is a pretty common pattern, as seen in SharePoint.

Analyzer

We made really nice changes in the analyzer to address feedback you’ve given us.

  • Details view: filter by error type. This gives a super-powerful way to visualize certain errors.
  • Details view: Paint overview graph on details zoom bar. This enables you to see what was going on in the test at a particular point in time.
  • Maximize use of space in graph view for graphs: make zoombars and fonts smaller, move vertical zoom
  • Counter Range Groups sets like ranges for like counters (e.g. two instances of the same counter always use the same range, or related counters such as Bytes Sent, Bytes Received, and Bytes Total)
  • Use transaction request time, not elapsed time, in stats
  • Show transaction stats in tables view
  • Differentiate GET and POST for the same urls in reports

Reporting

  • Select default counters for excel reports. This makes it a lot easier to create your first report.
  • Excel reports now work on 64 bit Excel

Load Test API

  • Expose run id in load test object

Please install the RC and send us your feedback.

Thanks,

Ed.