Microsoft took into account the feedback around performance issues and bugs provided by Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 users and decided to extend the Beta period. The new Visual Studio version introduces a lot of changes, including many features focused on multicore programming. A new checkpoint release, a Release Candidate would be publicly available during February 2010.S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Developer Division made it very clear in his blog post "Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta period extended". The launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 won't be in March, it would a few weeks later than expected in order to react to the new feedback obtained with the forthcoming Release Candidate.

This is great news. Microsoft is working on improving the software and is considering the feedback. It's a good idea to take the time to solve the bugs and to improve the overall performance for the IDE. I've been talking about some of these problems during my posts. The new features related to parallel programming are really useful. However, a slow IDE with huge memory consumption and too many crashes per day doesn't make it possible to take advantage of all these new features. In fact, it makes the developer less productive and that wasn't the original idea for Visual Studio 2010.

Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 saw the light in October. It was a significant improvement over Beta 1. Performance was better, the IDE took less time to start and many bugs were solved. However, this improvements offered developers a more stable IDE to start exploring additional features. New performance problems appeared, new crashes, new bugs. In fact, it is really difficult to use many of the new features without having a crash or a memory problem in real-life projects.

The team working on Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and the Task Parallel Library is always encouraging developers to give them feedback. I have given some feedback to these teams and I'm sure they're going to be able to consider all the problems and create an exciting new IDE.

I'm happy with this news because there will be a public Release Candidate and it will be possible to have a really stable and productive IDE with the new release date. As I've been working with Visual Studio 2010 since the CTP, I've been able to test all the improvements and I'm sure a Release Candidate will be better than Beta 2.

In order to translate multicore power into application performance, future Visual Studio 2010 developers need an IDE with great performance. Parallel programming requires many additional tests, like speedup tests, scalability tests and new debugging procedures. These new requirements call for a complete IDE with a nice performance to avoid reducing developers' productivity.