Is it wise to work with Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate?

Question

I downloaded VS 2010 RC and want to try it out.

• Can I use it to create commercial software?
• When will the final version be released?

Answer 1

The final version of Visual Studio 2010 will probably be released on April 12th, 2010.

However, you can already use the release candidates of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 which both are go live releases (since Beta 2). This means that there will be no breaking changes in the final release versus RC that will make your software unusable, and that they are licensed for developing and deploying production applications.

As with all Visual Studio versions, it is possible to target another earlier .NET framework version, that is you can still develop for .NET 2.0 as an example.

It is also possible to – and in fact a good idea – install Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio.

All in all I see no risk in trying out Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. It is obvious that it is not the most stable piece of software at this moment, but certainly usable.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2010 can target previous versions of the .NET framework, so that's not a problem. However, projects or solutions that were created or modified with Visual Studio 2010 cannot be opened by Visual Studio 2008 without manually editing the project files. So I would definitely not recommend upgrading to VS2010 if you work on a team and your teammates still use VS2008.

Answer 3

Work on whatever you want, but I think you should study your customers, as to what OS do they use, are they looking to upgrade, the effects of net 4.0 on your application, etc...

Whenever these things come out, there should always be a phasing plan in place. Although, it's more work, I personally think that it's a great approach

Answer 4

I tried vs 2010 beta 2 with a MFC application. The intelisense is improved but the compilers has some problems - sometimes it just freezes and I have to restart VS. Maybe this was fixed in the RC version that was released a few days ago.

Take in consideration that you might have to pay a price (instability) for new technologies.

Answer 5

VS2010 is not yet released for commercial use. So if you are using it for commercial use, it is not appropriate. Though it was planned for March 2010 release, you can expect it with some possible delay.

Answer 6

As long as you're not targeting the 4.0 runtime, you can use it to develop and deploy applications today.

Answer 7

You can still target previous Framework versions so if you want to develop applications there is no reason why it should be any different. The issue would come if you tried to develop .Net 4 solutions as there will not be many people using that yet, especially commercially

Answer 8

Believe the final version will be released end of March. Until then you can't distribute it to customers as the .NET 4.0 installer won't be made available to them.

Is it wise to do so? Well it probably depends on your product. If it's mission critical I'd wait till it's been used for a bit and any bugs are ironed out of .NET 4.0 via service packs. For normal applications I don't really see why not, it's had some pretty rigorous testing internally and by dev's I'm sure.