News

VS2010 Set for April Launch

• By Michael Desmond
• January 15, 2010

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 are set to officially launch on Monday, April 12, according to a brief blog post late Wednesday evening by Rob Caron, marketing communications manager for Developer and User Experience Runtimes and Tools at Microsoft.

Originally slated to launch on March 22, VS2010 was delayed by Microsoft to address concerns about performance and virtual memory behavior in the beta 2 version of the software, according to blog posts published by leading Microsoft Developer Division executives Scott Guthrie (here) and S. "Soma" Somasegar (here). Those posts described the length of the delay as "a few weeks." With an April 12 launch, VS2010 will end up shipping three weeks later than scheduled.

It's a brief hold up that most developers don't seem to mind dealing with.

Mickey Goussett is a Microsoft Visual Studio Team System MVP, consultant for Notion Solutions and a columnist for Visual Studio Magazine online. He said the announced delay came as a bit of a surprise but that "it will be well worth the extra wait." He thinks the additional time will benefit developers when VS2010 ships.

"I expect with Microsoft taking the extra time to specifically address performance and memory issues, that we should see some solid performance improvements with the final product," Goussett said.

Rob Sanfilippo, analyst, Developer Tools and Strategy, Directions on Microsoft, said the performance challenges facing the VS2010 team weren't hard to anticipate. "I'm not too surprised about the performance issues. I think it has a lot to do with getting it to at least match the previous release," Sanfilippo said.

VS2010 Beta 1 was released in May and Beta 2 followed in October. At PDC, company officials announced a March 22, 2010 launch date for the IDE and framework. The newly announced April 12 launch date coincides with the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas, April 12-14.

Beta 2 showed vast improvements over Beta 1, according to many developers. But two months into Beta 2, Somasegar and Guthrie announced Microsoft's intention to delay the launch and ship a public Release Candidate with a "go-live" license in the February timeframe.