Visual Studio 10 will launch on April 12th but I was wondering if there are folks who are already using it (and .NET 4) through RC beta-testing or so? What's the biggest difference you've noticed so far?

I had a chance to get to "work" (aka get it installed on my system) with it for quite some time now, because my company is Microsoft Gold partner. Be we don't use it in a production environment and some of us are just fooling around with it.

Well, the major change is, that the IDE is WPF based. With the 1st test releases, this had a huge performance impact and IMHO it looked sort of strange. But the speed is now "acceptable". But I wonder how fast it will in Monday's version.

F# is another .Net language you can use now. It is .Net/IL based.

I know there are some things broken in WPF, which worked in 3.5. I have submitted some reports and had some e-mail exchanges... I just hope they fixed it in this release.

.Net 4 is quite a nice environment. There are some very interesting improvements to LINQ (aka PLINQ).

Somehow I missed all the new features they promised to add for C++... or maybe I just spent too less time to search for them.

Oh, I hate the new help system... I just hope they will release the "old" local viewer.

I didn't check Azure, Silverlight, XNA, or the other millions of new stuff they added... I didn't have too much time to play with it at the offce and in my spare time I prefer to look at other things like Erlang/OTP.

i never got to use the previous version but judging from the tutorial on the MSDN website that used the 2008 version theres tons of new stuff just like xaoxipiz mentioned. Also apparently it is faster and more flexible. Im only just beggining to learn C++ so i cant really say much but this far its been really stable and Pretty easy to use...

I have been fiddling around with the final version for some days, now: Microsoft really did a great job on the speed of WPF interface, especially compared to the pre-release versions. Well, the VS Ultime Version is just the best IDE around, even with some quirks (some things didn't get fixed, yet).

As much as I love to work with C# and VS2010, I hate Microsoft C++. C++ is such a great language, but the only good thing on Windows is the VS2010 Editor. I really prefer doing C++ in a Linux/Unix environment (actually with VIM, Emacs, or Netbeans). Still there are some things, you can only do with C++ on Windows; but C# is much more elegent.

I also tried to do some F# thingies... but somehow I prefer Erlang to it... maybe retlang, beacause of C#... ;-)

The architect tools are also interesting. I like the "lightweight UML". That's much more convenient than UML 2.0.

I finished installing the TFS last week... soon I will try the automated tests... hopefully.

Besides: check out this tutorial to get the ultimate version! There are some torrents out there with the keys already included in the ISO (VS Ultimate and TFS).

I have to reinstall Windows this month anyway, so still on VS2008 for now

Im waiting for my school to get the download for it on MSDNAA.

You should upgrade then, its worth it.
I saw a friend use 2008 and i saw how much faster and simpler VS2010 is and better looking..

I've tried it but they've done some stupid things to the interface that I just can't understand, mainly leaving out the middleclick autoscroller which is paramount for me. There are a heap of complaints about it, and Microsoft said they left it out due to being short on time and will likely include it again on the next major version

There is a thirdparty plugin for enabling it but plugins don't work on the Express versions, and I haven't looked for a pro version yet (that matches the official disc).

I've been using VS2010 Ultimate (thank you bizspark) for a few months and for me it's so much more productive than VS2008 although I'm no developer by any stretch of the imagination, just an IT Executive who plays a lot of golf when not studying. Some handy things are implicit line continuation, multiline lambdas, covariant and contravariant interfaces, collection initialisers and array literals and auto properties if you like that. Intellisense is better, the Silverlight designer is better and eveything borrowed from blend works nicely.

Some of the not so great I've seen at work, VC++2010 bug with full screen OpenGL with the IDE being redrawn but that was probably a GLU thing, issues with WPFFontCache, server explorer not supporting MSSQL 2000, massive memory requirements, WIN764 issues corrupting RESX and moans on data elements after a serialized stream the only work around being to target non x86 cpu which breaks EAC and the same could be said about some COM assembly to target 64bit, intellisense crashes.

The best way to make sure a product is to your liking is to report bugs, so get involved people!

And if you're new to VS2010 then check out the Holy Grail


BTW: MS are always dragging their feet with everything they do, kinda used it these days.