Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 RTM is Available

We are very excited to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 on April 12^th.  This represents the biggest tools release from Microsoft in many years.

As mentioned in Somasegar’s recent blog post, the new release of Visual Studio 2010 has plenty of compelling new features and updates that will make every developer more productive.

• Visual Studio 2010 allows users target of the right platform for their application, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint. Office, Windows Azure, and Windows Phone 7 applications using their existing skills.
• Visual Studio 2010 is a rich, personalized development environment.  We know that software developers spend much of their time in the IDE, and features like the new editor and multi-monitor support make your time in Visual Studio more productive and enjoyable.
• Teams are able to work more efficiently using Application Lifecycle Management tools.  We’ve done a great deal of work in Visual Studio 2010 to improve testing and debugging tools.  Features like IntelliTrace and easy project management help your team ensure high quality.

In addition to these features, there are a number of new features available for building SharePoint 2010 solutions.  Here are some of those:

• Complete integration of SharePoint projects within the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
• Project templates for creating the most common SharePoint 2010 solutions such as Visual Web Parts, Workflows, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) external content types, Event Receivers, List Definitions, site Definitions, and many more.
• Project templates which enable declarative artifacts and reusable workflows that were created in SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010 to be imported into Visual Studio 2010 and then be included in a SharePoint project.  These artifacts and workflows can be modified as needed after they are imported and/or added to existing projects.
• SharePoint developers have first class access to source code control, code analysis, and many other application lifecycle management features of both Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010.
• Item templates for common SharePoint 2010 artifacts such as Web Parts, Application Pages, List Instances, Content Types, Workflow Association & Initiation Forms, Resource files and others.  There is also a generic Empty Element which can be used to create any SharePoint artifact that may be needed.
• Visual designers for building Web Parts, Workflows, and BCS external content types.
• Robust packaging and deployment is supported which allows you to add SharePoint items to your project and then press F5 to debug your solution without having to worry about how the items are packaged into features.  Designers are provided for when you want to change the default feature(s) and packaging, in addition to a Packaging Explorer which shows all of the packages, features, and items across all of the projects in the solution.
• A number of wizards which make creating projects and adding items easier, including support for Sandboxed solutions.
• Numerous project, item, and file properties which allow the developer to have precise control over how each item/file is packaged and deployed.
• Connections can be added now to the Server Explorer for any of the site collections on your local SharePoint 2010 server which allows you to quickly see what artifacts exist on the server from within the Visual Studio IDE.
• Configurable and extensible deployment options for complete control over deployment of the packaged solution.
• Robust extensibility is available throughout the new SharePoint project system and tools.

To purchase Visual Studio 2010 now, visit here.  If you are an MSDN subscriber, later in the day on April 12th you can download Visual Studio 2010 from MSDN.

Mike Morton