Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for MSDN subscribers, and generally available on October 21. I haven’t had a chance yet to play around with it, but some of the CLR changes that are very exciting to hear about are:
- The new String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method indicates whether a string is null, empty, or consists only of white-space characters.
- New overloads have been added to the String.Concat and String.Join methods that concatenate members of an IEnumerable<T> collections.
- The String.Concat<T> method lets you concatenate each element in an enumerable collection without first converting the elements to strings.
- The new Enum.HasFlag method determines whether one or more bit fields or flags are set in an enumeration value.
- The Enum.TryParse<TEnum> method returns a Boolean value that indicates whether a string or integer value could be successfully parsed.
- You can now easily copy one stream into another with the CopyTo method in classes that inherit from the System.IO.Stream class.
- New Path.Combine method overloads enable you to combine file paths.
- You can now parse System.Guid structures.
- The new Microsoft.Win32.RegistryOptions enumeration lets you specify a volatile registry key that does not persist after the computer restarts.
- Registry keys no longer are restricted to a maximum length of 255 characters.
I’m really looking forward to these improvements, particularly Enum.HasFlags, Enum.TryParse, String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace, Guid.TryParse, and Path.Combine(string[]). Of course, since some of these weren’t in Beta 1 (at least as far as I saw), it means revising some of the chapters for my book.