Big news from ScottGu’s blog(Scott Guthrie lives in Seattle and builds a few products for Microsoft) is that there will be another public preview release of VS2010 and .NET 4 before shipping the final product.

In October was shipped the public Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.  The feedback on the new features in VS 2010 and .NET 4 has been really great.  He has been working on a blog series about some of them  and has also had a chance to present them to a broad range of audiences – and it has been great hearing the excitement people have about them.

At the same time, though, was also received feedback that the performance and virtual memory usage of VS 2010 Beta 2 is not where people need it to be before Microsoft ship.

It has been done an intensive performance optimization push the last two months that is delivering significant performance and virtual memory usage improvements across the product.The early feedback from a small set of customers testing interim builds since Beta2 has been positive about these improvements. There are still several big performance fixes in the process of being checked in that will improve things even further.

Public Release Candidate

In order to make sure that these fixes truly address the performance issues reported, and to help validate them across the broadest number of scenarios and machine configurations, Microsoft decided to ship another public preview release of VS 2010 and .NET 4 before they ship.  Specifically, Microsoft plan to make a Release Candidate build available in February that everyone will be able to download and test.  It will be a public build and include a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment.

The goal behind the Release Candidate is to get broad feedback on the readiness of the product.  In order to ensure that Microsoft are able to receive and react to this feedback, they will also be moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back a few weeks.