Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is available!

The first difference that I saw, was the installation size. In Beta 2 my configuration was around 3.7GB, in RC it increased to 4.2GB! Still, the Release Candidate makes it worth every MB, because it’s lightning fast! The Add reference window is “just there” and the whole IDE just feels very very responsive: great work VS team!

Another thing that I noticed, is the improved experience with the new Visual Studio SharePoint development tools. As you know there is a new connection available in the Server Explorer that allows you to explore SharePoint content from within Visual Studio. In previous versions it took sometimes a little while to get the content from SharePoint and display it, but now? You click it, and it’s there. Sometimes it makes me feel like the tools are one step ahead of me! Awesome experience. Big thanks to Mike Morton and his team for the great work!

The only drawback to the RC release, that I’ve seen so far, has to do with the Visual Studio Gallery. Because of the RC, all the extensions that I put in the gallery got unpublished as they were incompatible with the newest release of Visual Studio. Although upgrading the extensions was pretty easy and everything is back to normal again, it’s a shame that the gallery didn’t send any notification about unpublishing the extensions.

In spite of the thing with the Visual Studio Gallery, the new version of Visual Studio definitely rocks! So in case you haven’t done it yet, go to MSDN and get your copy of Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate with the brand new SharePoint development tools!

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