On the 12th as planned, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010. As an update it’s pretty extensive where not all of it’s good but it’s the way of the future so progress we must.

With it, the latest .NET Framework, 4, was available. This also includes a ‘client profile’ release of .NET 4 which I personally feel is a complete and utter waste of time only serving to confuse the hell out of developers and users alike. For the sake of a few MB, install the full runtime and ignore the marketing spin. if Microsoft were serious about runtime size, they’d have scrapped the .NET Framework for UI/desktop and moved everyone to Silverlight…

This brings me neatly to another release – Silverlight 4 (although delayed until the 18th). Somewhat strangely the development tools are provided at an RC2 release version. RTM is expected ‘soon’.

It must be hard to release so many ‘seperate’ things at once!

VS 2010 now sports a WPF editor integrated into the existing native framework. There are bits that look a little rough, it’s a little slower (not nearly as bad/[unusable] as the beta’s however), more resource hungry, etc. It does mark the return of the UI visual designer for Silverlight which seems a lot better than what they delivered in Vs2008. Hopefully they’ll stop diverting time to Blend or at least make the products use a single codebase.

Upgrades of existing projects seems to be as previous versions of Visual Studio. Most things just work! I did find some quirks however. A caveat is that I’ve not really kept up to date with the Vs 2010 pre-release versions so it’s likely the issues I’ve had could have been there all along.

• .NET assemblies get upgraded to Vs2010 but their profile is set to .NET Framework 2.0 – even if they require a later revision of the Framework (3.0 & 3.5 in the case of my examples). Quick project properties edit sorted that.
• Managed C++ projects fail to convert if they have been previously upgraded and the Vs2010 machines does not have the previous version(s) of VS to refer to. A quick hack of the project files to remove the ‘upgrade’ property page references sorted that.
• I’ve still got the occasional issue where some C++ projects just fail to build and devenv has been seen to use 100% CPU whilst spawning MSBuild child processes that never generate any build output! Hopefully these annoyances will go away or get fixed PDQ.
• Use of controls in a .NET 4 assembly. This could be a major issue or not. From what I understood the .NET 4 runtime can load multiple CLR versions in order to cope with re-use of existing assemblies. However, this didn’t seem to work too well during the build as the License creation failed not able to load the control. I must spend some more time on this to see if it’s my misunderstanding, an issue with the control or a complete can of worms..
• Test projects will not run under anything other than Framework 4. Whether this will be an issue given the previous point I do not know yet!

If you get VS2010 for free (as in MSDN or other official channels) then you’ll no doubt be upgrading to keep within the license terms. I personally wouldn’t be rushing out to purchase VS2010 however. TFS 2010 on the other hand is a well rounded release and I’ll hopefully be updating our pre-release installation to RTM before too long.