Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 is out and its absolutely free for you to use it and get an early glimpse of the final version of the product. Some of the major features are :
- Office Development in Visual Studio 2010
- Multi-targeting create an application that works even for lower version of .Net Framework even if you have developed it for high version.
- Parallel Computing
- Workflow Foundation
- Multi-targeted Silverlight development
- Editable design surface for Silverlight.
You can check out the video on Downloading and Installing this version of Visual Studio 2010 and Framework 4 here
I wonder if the beta either expires or if the final .NET framework would be incompatible in any way with applications created using the VS beta.
Personally I wasn’t a big fan of VS08 (or was it 07?) and I’ve stuck to the class VB98 instead of VB.NET. I’ve seen no real advantage to using .NET. (Most anything can be accomplished in VB98 using API calls).