Last week, we published the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate.  Since then we’ve seen a strong positive reports from customers about their experience so far with the release. 

I meet with a team of about 20 folks every morning to review the latest feedback from a variety of sources and discuss the latest trends and responses.  We look at install data indicating a strong demand and high install success rate.  We look at the satisfaction survey (if you haven’t taken it yet, please do) which gives us both a quantitative as well as qualitative feel for how things are going.  We also look at Twitter (please use the #vs2010 hashtag), top rated bugs from Connect, responses to key blogs (including those from Soma, Scott, Jason and Brian) and Forum participation (ALM, VS Pro, and .NET). All of this helps me get a good sense of how we’re doing and where we need to spend time addressing before we release our final version. 

So far, the response has been very encouraging. Here are some representative comments:

• Just tried VS2010 RC. One word incredible. Super fast, great build with things I saw in earlier releases fixed. So awesome.
• First impressions: Fast builds,clean,no hangs, fast intellisense,better font rendering.
• Congratulations for the RC Milestone, #VS2010seems pretty more snapier, also looks more fine-grained like an finished product!
• VS2010 RC: I must admit, I am impressed. Major speed and performance improvements. They are obvious immediately!
• Trying out VS2010 RC: Snappier UI, much faster intellisense, significant build time reduction, etc. Overall: AWESOME JOB!
• VS 2010 RC performance is ridiculously faster, can't wait to switch over full time!
• Oh my goodness, VS2010 RC is much, much faster. Kudos to the VS perf team and everyone else. Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 :-)
• #vs2010 is fast like ambulances flying through a school zone at 120 mph being chased by ninjas. and the ninjas are on fire!
• Very speedy to load projects and compile. Fast to move through the IDE. a VAST improvement over Beta 2
• It's become a lot faster, feels faster as well. I love the improvement you made from BETA1 to BETA2 to RC.
• As far as I've tested it, performance is absolutely awesome. It was my biggest concern in Beta2, but right now it seems as fast as VS2008, or even better.

Through this we’ve also identified a few issues including:

• Upgrading from Beta2 – Before installing the RC, you’ll need to uninstall the Beta2 version.  Aaron has posted a blog article covering this in a bit more detail. 
• Corrupt DVD ISO downloads – some customers are encountering issues with corrupt DVD ISO files after downloading. Heath Stewart from our deployment team has written a good blog article on this issue.
• Intellisense crashes – some customers are are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed.  We’ve published a patch to this problem which you should apply immediately.  You can read more about it here.  Let us know if it doesn’t help address your problem. 
• Silverlight 4 support - We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop. If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now. 
• Express availability – we did not provide any of the Express versions of VS with the release candidate.  All the features are available in the drops we’ve included.  Express editions will be sim-shipped at RTM.  It was just easier for drop logistics to limit the number of SKU’s we posted.
• Mobile tools support - as with Beta2, the RC does not include Mobile support. While Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t contain built-in mobile support, we are working closely with the Mobile team to deliver support for mobile development to VS 2010 developers in the future.

If you haven’t already, please take this opportunity to download, install and begin using the VS2010 RC.  If you plan to ‘go live’ with this build, please read my article on this.  If you have installed please take a few moments to submit your thoughts on our survey. 

Thanks for helping us ship a great Visual Studio 2010 release.

Jeff