Microsoft delays Visual Studio 2010 launch

'Performance issues'

Microsoft will delay the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 in order to have more time to address performance issues.

The software giant said Friday it plans an additional test version — a release candidate — to launch in February while the tool set's engineering team focuses on improving performance.

"As you might have seen, we significantly improved performance between Beta 1 and Beta 2," Sosa Somasegar, senior veep of Microsoft's Developer Division, wrote in a blog post announcing the delay. "Based on what we've heard, we clearly needed to do more work."

Microsoft originally slated the final release build for March 22, 2010. Somasegar said the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 releases will now be pushed back "a few weeks."

He said beta users have specifically fingered performance issues "in a few key scenarios including virtual memory usage."

New features in Visual Studio 2010 include Windows 7 and SharePoint 2010 tools, drag-and-drop binding with Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, and adding Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) for programming with scripting languages, and support for parallel programming. Microsoft also chopped down nine Visual Studio SKUs to four, and it will chuck in added benefits for MSDN subscribers. ®