After a long silence since the last CTP (Community Technology Preview), Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 that comes with the new .Net Framework 4.0. This new release will bring new promising features that empower parallel programming using the supported languages.I must say that the Visual Studio 2010 CTP was not very useful to test the new multi-core performance improvements. It was available as a Virtual PC image and it expired on January 1 2009 (a few months ago).

In the meantime, there were many interesting changes in the Task Parallel Library, now included as part of .Net Framework 4.0. However, it was difficult to test their performance because Virtual PC 2007 was limited to using a single core. Testing multi-core programming in a single core virtual machine was not really useful. This first beta version will bring us the truth about the performance improvements.

I'm especially interested in the improved garbage collector and the last changes in the Parallel Extensions. The new features offered by .Net 4.0 are very promising and it is very important to begin measuring the performance that can be achieved with the new ThreadPool and the new task-based approach.

The new debugger will simplify the debugging process for multi-core development. Besides, a multi-monitor support in the IDE makes things easier when you have to work with more than eight threads and watch them. As a Core i7 with Hyper-Threading offers 8 logical cores, it is very probable to work with applications with more than 8 threads with Visual Studio 2010.

The new features are promising for parallel programming. However, this is the first Beta release. Now, it's time to test the performance and to check the changes in the Task Parallel Library and in the Concurrency and Coordination Run-time.

MSDN subscribers can download Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 1 today (May 18th). Non-subscribers will have to wait for May 20th, just two days.

If you are an MSDN subscriber, you can log-in and download.

If you aren't an MSDN subscriber, check Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Web page and wait until Wednesday.