[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

This afternoon we made available the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release candidates. You can find download links here.

Right now the downloads are available only to MSDN subscribers. Starting Wednesday (Feb 10th) everyone will be able to download them (regardless of whether you are a MSDN subscriber or not).

Background on the Release Candidate

I blogged about us deciding to ship a public VS 2010 release candidate last December. The primary motivation behind releasing a public RC was to ensure that we could get broad testing and feedback on the performance and stability work we’ve been doing since the last public VS 2010 Beta 2 release.

Over the last few months we’ve been releasing interim builds to a small set of folks who have been helping us validate fixes and measure very large projects and solutions. The feedback from them has been extremely positive the last few weeks – which is why we are now opening up today’s build to a much wider set of people to people to try out.

The RC has only been out a few hours so far – but the feedback so far on Twitter has been nice to see:

@DanWahlin: The performance improvements with Visual Studio 2010 RC compared to previous builds are huge. Really happy with what I'm seeing so far.

@peterbromberg: VS2010 RC: I must admit, I am impressed. Major speed and performance improvements. They are obvious immediately!

@Nick_Craver: RC performance is ridiculously faster, can't wait to switch over full time!

@Rlz2cool: Just tried VS2010 RC. One word incredible. Super fast, great build with things I saw in earlier releases fixed. So awesome.

@ddotterer: Trying out VS2010 RC: Snappier UI, much faster intellisense, significant build time reduction, etc. Overall: AWESOME JOB

@tomkirbygreen: Oh my goodness, VS2010 RC is much, much faster. Kudos to the VS perf team and everyone else. Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 :-)

@JoshODBrown The developers on the Visual Studio 2010 RC must have had their usual beverages replaced with unicorn tears or something. # VS2010 #awesome

#awesome @jbristowe: Holy Butterball! VS 2010 RC is crazy fast. It makes me feel like this: http://bit.ly/cPaOvE

Reporting Issues

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix. If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it. I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

If you do install and use the VS 2010 RC we’d also really appreciate if you would fill out this survey about your experiences.

Answers to a few questions and known issues

Here are a few answers to some questions/known issues:

If you have previously installed VS 2010 Beta 2 on your computer you should use Add/Remove Programs (within Windows Control Panel) to remove VS 2010 Beta2 and .NET 4 Beta2 before installing the VS 2010 RC. Note that VS 2010 RC can be installed on the same machine side-by-side with VS 2008 and VS 2005.

Silverlight 3 projects are supported with today’s VS 2010 RC build – however Silverlight 4 projects are not yet supported. We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop. If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now.

We recently identified a crashing bug that can impact systems that have multi-touch and some screen-readers enabled. We are working on a patch for people who are impacted by it.

We recently found an issue where project upgrades from VS 2008 can take a long time to complete if the project has .xsd files within them. If you think VS is taking a long time on a project upgrade give it a few more minutes to complete before assuming it has hung – you might be running into this slow upgrade issue. Note that once the project is upgraded the performance should return to normal. We are working to fix this with the final release.

Hope this helps,

Scott