Visual Studio 2010 Goes SP1
For many Microsoft products, the first service pack is a right of passage. Many dev and IT managers don't consider a new OS or application mature until it has been updated with its first major service pack. By that metric, the
release today of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is big news.
As ever, Microsoft cites customer feedback as the driving force behind this latest service pack. Features like extended IntelliTrace support for 64-bit and SharePoint development projects, an improved Help Viewer and fully integrated tooling for Silverlight 4 were all requested by Visual Studio customers, according to Microsoft's Jason Zander. There's also now unit testing support for Visual Studio 2010 projects targeting .NET Framework 3.5.
The list of updates, improvements and changes is long and definitely worth a look for anyone using, or thinking of using, Visual Studio 2010. You can find a detailed rundown on the Microsoft Support site.
What's interesting about Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is that it's not one of those "put out the fire" service packs that Microsoft has scrambled to produce in the past. By most accounts, Visual Studio 2010 has been impressively stable. As Directions on Microsoft Analyst Rob Sanfilippo told me the other day: "VS 2010 has been a solid, successful release. It has delivered on its promises and has been a stable environment, without the requirement of any major patches since it shipped."
Jason Beres, director of product management at component maker Infragistics, says his company has been doing design time testing with the SP, and that it fixed "some visual issues" that reduced the productivity of some developers.
Will you be updating to Service Pack 1? I'd like to learn what you find out when you do. Email me at mdesmond@1105media.com, or provide comment below.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/08/2011