News

Microsoft Patches Bug in Visual Studio 2010 RC

• By Michael Desmond
• February 17, 2010

The Visual Studio 2010 release candidate (RC) arrived last week to largely positive reviews, earning praise from the developer community for its improved performance and stability. Still, testers are finding a few rough edges in the penultimate pre-release of Microsoft's flagship IDE.

Jeff Beehler, chief of staff for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft, detailed several issues with the RC in a blog post.

The most troubling issue centers around crashes related to VS 2010's IntelliSense feature, which Microsoft has addressed with a downloadable patch. According to Beehler, the crashes can occur when developers type in the editor while IntelliSense is either popping up or being dismissed. Developers are advised to download the patch immediately. More details on the problem are available here.

The other reported issues are minor and can be resolved by taking care in downloading, installing and using the RC software. For instance, Beehler cautioned developers to uninstall VS 2010 Beta 2 before installing the RC to avoid issues. He also provided guidance for users who ended up downloading corrupt DVD ISO files.

Other issues relate to product alignment. VS 2010 Beta 2 included beta tooling for Silverlight 4 development, but this support was dropped in the RC. Peter Vogel, principal at PH&V Information Services and a contributing editor at Visual Studio Magazine, called the omission a sensible step.

"The only item that has really concerned me is the absence of Silverlight 4 support," said Vogel, who also encountered the corrupt DVD ISO problem. "It makes sense to put beta stuff in another beta as VS 2010 did with the Silverlight 4 beta. However, the RC is...presumably your first look at what you will be using in production. As such, it shouldn't include beta stuff."

Beehler also noted that versions of Visual Studio Express were not included in the RC in an effort to cut down on the number of posted SKUs. VS Express will ship at the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) stage with the rest of the product versions.

Finally, Beehler noted that VS 2010 has lacked mobile support throughout the pre-release cycle, and that support will be added "in the future."

Jeff Levinson, ALM practice lead at Northwest Cadence Corp, has been working with the RC bits extensively on five different systems. He called the VS 2010 RC "a huge leap over Beta 2" and said performance has improved enormously. Still, some issues remain. He singled out delays when loading large projects and with Windows Presentation Foundation apps during the debug process. He also noted that the upgrade from Beta 2 can be difficult.

"The biggest complaint from customers is the process template version -- it isn't upgraded for them and they have to grab them from a fresh collection," Levinson said.

VS 2010 is scheduled to be released on April 12. Microsoft originally scheduled its final release for March 22, but delayed the launch after testers encountered significant performance issues in the beta software