VS2010 Beta 2, Release dates, and More

You probably noticed that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released for download today (for MSDN subscribers). The general release will be Wednesday (Oct 21).

I’ve had limited time (obviously) to work with this, but I’m already impressed.  The WPF editor has shown lots of progress. It’s much more responsive than in earlier beta builds. The language features (at least for C#) are coming along well.

That bodes well for the announced release date of March 22, 2010. Yes, they’ve placed a stake in the ground, and this release has an official launch date.

In addition, Microsoft made some announcements about MSDN licensing and pricing.  Microsoft has the full announcement here. There are a couple of interesting items that are very important in this announcement:

1. Every Visual Studio Premium license includes Team Foundation Server with 1 Cal. That means if your team has VS Premium, you can use TFS right out of the box.

2. WIndows Azure “Development and Test Use”. Visual Studio Premium (and above) will include compute hours (and data storage) in Windows Azure for test purposes. (UPDATE:  The full terms are here.) VS2010 with Premium MSDN will get (initially) 750 hours of compute time per month, 10 Gigabytes of storage, and more).

That promises to be a very exciting 2010!