Recently I installed Windows 7 RC1 at home to get a first glance at the new and exciting windows operating system. Shortly after installing Windows 7 I also downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to have a quick overview about the .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 and the development environment. Here’s a brief description how my setup and first look experience went like.
The setup experience was very smoothly. Actually the setup didn’t provide any exciting or new feature. The setup routine is the same as already known with Visual Studio 2008. One annoying part during the setup although is that the latest service pack for Sql Server 2008 Express Edition is not included in the setup routine. This leads to the following compatibility warning during installation procedure (here shown on Visual Studio 2010 Team Suite Beta 1 Setup):
The compatibility issue can be overcome by installing Sql Server 2008 Sp1 after installing Visual Studio 2010. I hope this will be fixed when shipping Visual Studio 2010 final edition.
When opening Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 a nice start page is presented to the developer. For me this looks a bit like eclipse what I can remember so far. The RSS feeds area on the start page is now banned to the bottom of the start page and the more important tasks such as customization and extension installation is directly available on the start page (for me this is a major improvement regarding the start page).
One nice feature is also the included extension manager which is similarly constructed like the eclipse update site. The extensions are grouped by purpose and can be directly installed by downloading the extension in the extension manager. At the time of this writing some useful extensions and code templates were already available although the extension site is still under development.
The new project wizard has some new project templates especially for WCF and Workflow Foundation. For example the WCF project templates offer now Syndication Service Library and declarative templates which allow visual “drawing” of the service behavior. Sharepoint and Office templates are also included with the standard installation.
This is only a quick glance at the new Visual Studio 2010. More to come later!
And most important: the background is blue and not grey anymore 😀
Thanks urs for sharing this useful information with us 😉