It’s finally here.  Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 release candidate is available for everyone to download now.

To download the public RC of Visual Studio 2010 go the RC landing page: 

Since the beta we’ve been focused on performance improvements, reducing memory requirements, increasing stability and fixing customer reported bugs.

Here are just a few of the tweets flying around about the RC:

@CanadianJames	#vs2010 is fast like ambulances flying through a school zone at 120 mph being chased by ninjas. and the ninjas are on fire!
@ddotterer	Trying out VS2010 RC: Snappier UI, much faster intellisense, significant build time reduction, etc. Overall: AWESOME JOB! #vs2010 #vs2010RC
@alazlasse	Testing #VS2010 RC performance: loading solution (41 projects): 28% faster, rebuild 20% faster. Smooth.
@mmjv	Installed #VS2010 RC in a vpc, performs really well, noticeably better than beta 2
@mikasten	VS2010 RC installed. Definitely feeling the speed improvements. #vs2010
@malovicn	REALLY impressed with #VS2010 RC performance
@JohnMReynolds	Wow! In VS2010 RC, loading my solution takes about 5 seconds vs the 30-40 seconds it took in Beta 2!

Here are few of the posts covering Visual Studio 2010 RC:

• Check out ScottGu’s blog on VS2010 RC at  http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/02/08/vs-2010-net-4-release-candidate.aspx
• Jason Zander has a great interview on VS2010 RC on Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jason-Zander-Visual-Studio-2010-Release-Candidate/
• Walkthroughs for Visual Studio 2010 RC are at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd441784.aspx
• Visual Studio 2010 RC includes a “go live” license.  Jeff Beehler has a great post “Going live” with the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate

Scott’s blog post includes a list of known issues most notable are:

• Silverlight 4 support is not included in the RC release of Visual Studio 2010.  Silverlight 4 Tooling for RC will be released with the next public release of Silverlight 4.
• Visual Studio 2010 RC ships with MVC 2 RC.  To upgrade MVC to RC 2, just uninstall the MVC 2 runtime (not tools) and then install MVC 2 RC 2 runtime.

Several web hosters are also gearing up to support the ASP.Net 4.0 RC release.  Stay tuned to this site for an announcement coming soon.

To provide feedback on the RC please visit the Visual Studio Connect site.  You can also contact the Web Tooling team directly by sending mail to vsweb@microsoft.com