When Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2010 would be pushed back a few weeks, they stated they would be shipping a Release Candidate (RC) in February. As of February 8th, the RC is available on the MSDN Subscribers site. The same downloads will be available publicly on the Microsoft Downloads site starting Wednesday, February 10th.
The overall driving reason for pushing back the launch date was to concentrate on performance. Brian Harry has a post covering some of the improvements made to performance since Beta 2. While I’ve only had the RC installed for a very short time, the difference in performance (between Beta 2 and the RC) are noticeable.
If you are planning on installing the RC, here are a few links to help you get going:
- TFS 2010 Beta2 to RC Upgrade Guide – by Bryan Krieger – a guide for upgrading from Beta 2 to the RC.
- Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and Visual Studio (VS) 2010, addressing the core problem of teams in the field who are unaware of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server capabilities or have little time to invest in detailed education.
- Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide – this guide covers in-place upgrades as well as migration upgrades and details the steps that must be completed for more than a dozen specific scenarios. For example, enabling branch visualization in upgraded projects, splitting team projects into multiple collections, and much more.
- Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010 – the purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around branching and merging with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.
- Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance - the goal of this guidance is to provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle.
- Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory - the purpose of this project is to build prescriptive guidance around virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines using the VM Factory.
Also, check out this post for Visual Studio 2010 pricing.