Kevin Hoffman

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available to MSDN subscribers and will be available to the public at large late next week. The list of stuff that is awesome and worth checking out in VS2010 Beta 2 is too long and ridiculously in-depth for me to cover here. Some of the big things that affect me right off the bat are the following:

• ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built right into the installation. Finally we get convergence of the ASP.NET MVC project and VS2010 tools. Up until now, MVC 2 was only working on VS2008 which sucked for us early adopters of VS2010 and MVC!
• Azure Tools - there's a project type in here that when you create a new project of this type ("Cloud Service") it tells you how to get going with Azure. Current versions of Azure only run on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and right now I have enough available virtualization and memory to not mingle. So right now, I'm not going to even bother trying to get Azure working on VS2010 until I know the Azure back-end is running .NET Framework 4 and there is native, in-IDE tooling for VS2010 like there is for VS2008.
• EF4 - All kinds of ridiculous stuff here. Be sure to check out the Entity Framework blog for information on what's new in Beta 2.
• WCF and WF - Workflow services, Workflow in general, and WCF overall have recieved quite a bit of overhauling and fine tuning since beta 1. Make sure you try workflow services with content-based correlation and service discovery - all very awesome stuff.
• Astoria with Projections - the same goodness that you've been enjoying with the 1.5 CTP2 of Astoria (including projections!!) is available already inside VS2010.

As I said, there are a billion other things available in VS2010 Beta 2 and there are a billion other blogs that have more detailed information on it so I'm not going to duplicate that stuff here.

Bottom line is this: Go grab VS2010 from your MSDN subscription now, or wait until they release it to the public during PDC. Start messing with it and start playing with it.