Microsoft is now offering a beta release of its service pack for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE that adds capabilities such as IntelliTrace support for 64-bit systems, company officials said.
MSDN subscribers can download the beta release Wednesday, while other users will be able to download the beta on Thursday. Visual Studio 2010 was released in April.
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"Service Pack 1 [SP1] continues that momentum of improving the developer experience by addressing some of the most requested features, like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64-bit and SharePoint, and including Silverlight 4 Tools in the box," said Jason Zander, corporate vice president for the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, in a blog post. "The goal for this service pack was to work hard on releasing a high-quality beta with a focus on only fixing the top set of important issues we heard about from our customers," Zander said.
Other capabilities include a local Help Viewer, which is a client application that offers productivity features such as an expandable table of contents, and better platform support, including Windows 7-specific MFC APIs that support Direct2D and Windows animation. Unit testing for .Net 3.5 is supported as well. A performance wizard for Silverlight that offers performance profiling also is included, along with a Visual Basic compiler runtime switch.
Zander did offer words of caution for ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) users and Visual Studio Async users. "If you have ASP.Net MVC 3 RC installed, please be aware that installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta will break Razor IntelliSense," he wrote in his blog. "There will be a new ASP.Net MVC 3 RC2 installer released next Monday that you can upgrade to in-place. If you've already installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta, don't uninstall the Beta Service Pack, just wait until Monday and upgrade your MVC installation."
"If you have Visual Studio Async CTP installed, please be aware that installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta will break Visual Studio Async CTP," Zander said. "We are looking at options for an updated release that will make the Visual Studio Async CTP compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1. In the meanwhile if you need to work with the CTP you should stick with VS2010 RTM."
