As promised in the previous post, here is a first look on Visual Studio 2010 RC. i am sure many of you have downloaded the bits already so this is for those who are waiting yet. VS 2010 RC is an upgrade to the Beta 2 that was shipped last year. This build has been heavily focussed on implementing community feedback and fixing performance issues reported. The start up screen looks as below. A little darker compared to the Beta 2 build. You can read my earlier post on First look on Beta 2 here
I didn’t notice much of changes to the project templates as yet. But, I did visibly see a great improvement in performance. Particularly when working with projects / solutions, Beta 2 used to take up a lot of resource which isn’t the case with this RC Build.
Couple of quick things that have been well documented and blogged about are that, there is no Express edition for this RC release. Silverlight 4 development and WCF RIA with Silverlight 4 isn’t supported in this RC build. Similarly, the RC build doesn’t support the Silverlight Business Application Development although the template is listed. When you select the template and try creating a project, it fails with “This project type is not supported by the current version” error.
WCF RIA Services works with ASP.NET scenario though and in my previous post, i have written about it.
With respect to Azure Development, there is a new set of tools released for this RC build as well. Rather it is a combined build for VS 2008 SP1 as well as VS 2010 RC. You can download the same from Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 (February 2010)
Before this, you would want to remove the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 as well as Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio 2008. In fact, the un-installation process for me was to remove the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 as well as the one for VS 2008.
Then, I removed VS 2010 Beta 2. This process was fairly simple, with the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 icon in Add/Remove programs removing all the installed programs that came as a part of the installation.
Post that, I installed VS 2010 RC and then installed the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 which is a single installer that puts the development templates for both the RC edition as well as VS 2008.
UPDATE: Even though the azure development tools are supported in Visual Studio 2010 RC, the Windows Azure runtime currently supports only .NET Framework 3.5 and hence when you build you will get the error “Cloud Service projects currently support Roles that run on .NET Framework version 3.5. Please set the Target Framework property in the project settings for this Role to .NET Framework 3.5”
As it explains, you need to select the project (not the cloud template, but the actual application project) and right click => select “Properties” and in the “Target Framework” to “.NET Framework 3.5” and then continue building the solution which in turn packages your application for Windows Azure Hosting.
Also, if you are working with ASP.NET MVC, Phil has a nice post on a work around to get the latest MVC RC build working with VS 2010 RC over here
There is a nice video on Channel 9 of Jason Zander that explains the RC release, feedbacks that went behind designing this release and changes thereof.
Cheers !!!