VS2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 Expected Soon

A few weeks ago, Scott Guthrie answered a wide array of developers' questions in a Linked .NET Users Group Webcast. Of particular interest was the timeframe of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 release. According to Guthrie, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET developer platform, the final beta of VS2010 and .NET 4 is expected in short order.

"That will be coming a little later this fall, so it is not that far away," he said. "We have hit the zero bug balance for our Beta 2 release last Friday [Aug. 21] so we are cranking away at that."

He continued, "Performance is pretty good, especially compared to Beta 1, there was a lot of performance work that we needed to do…"

When asked about the timeline for the final release, Guthrie said he was feeling pretty good about release in the first half of 2010, with the usual qualifiers. The RTM is typically four to six months after the final beta, noted Guthrie. "We are not making any promises right now, ultimately the quality of the product will matter in terms of delivering that," he said.

ASP.NET MVC did not make it into Beta 1. It is in Beta 2, according to Guthrie. Version 1 of the technology was released in March. Version 2, which adds support for data annotation and validation including a JQuery validation plug-in, is in the preview stage. ASP.NET MVC v2 will support VS2010 and .NET 4, as well as VS2008 and .NET 3.5, according to Guthrie.

The ASP.NET MVC technology is getting some traction. Bing.com was built on ASP.NET MVC, and major companies such as Walmart and Starbucks, among others are using it on their sites.

VS2010 and .NET 4 will offer improvements to both Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC, said Guthrie, who said on the Webcast, "both will be fully supported forever."

When asked if developers could expect any revolutionary technologies in the same vein as ASP.NET MVC, LINQ or Silverlight in the upcoming developer tooling and framework, Guthrie explained that one of the goals of VS2010 and .NET 4 is to "complete" the developer experience. Some of the improvements to Web Forms are indicative of this strategy, he said, such as better control over client IDs for script and CSS, "fine-grained" ViewState control, web.config files that can be left blank (without a bunch of entries) and still work, and the ability to use the same URL routing engine with ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms.

Guthrie kicked off a series of blog posts in late August that discuss what's coming in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. He will also be at PDC09 and "probably part of the keynote in some way," he said. You can download his 90 minute online chat with the Linked .NET Users Group here.

Windows 7, which includes .NET 3.5, may arrive before Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 beta 2. Are you developing apps with Windows 7 in mind? We want to include your insights in an upcoming Visual Studio Magazine feature on the new client OS. Express your opinions in our survey and tell us what aspects of Win7 are most intriguing and most disappointing to .NET developers.E-mail Visual Studio Magazine’s editor in chief Michael Desmond[email protected]

Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/03/2009