First look at Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Visual studio 2010 Beta 2 is out, so lets take a look at some of the changes:

1. The new WPF UI is a nice clean face lift.
2. The new extension manager makes getting, updating, and managing plug-ins, templates, and controls(Telerik has almost their entire product line available) from the web easy, my only real issue with the extension manager is I can’t find a way to load plug-ins that aren’t in the gallery, and a lot of my favorite plug-ins(Ghost doc and R#) aren’t supported yet.
3. The removal of the Team Studio versions, the Team Studio versions where confusing and over priced. The new SKUs are VS 2010 Professional, VS 2010 Premium, and VS 2010 Ultimate. For the full product descriptions see the Visual Studio Product page.

Some of the things that didn’t change:

1. Adding a reference is still slow and painful.
2. The testing frame work really hasn't changed much, although the test seem to run faster.

Things that are not quite there yet:

1. Intellisense doesn’t work very well, but this may be a configuration setting.
2. The number of supported plug-ins is limited, but that is understandable seeing that the plug-in model has completely changed

All in all I really like Visual Studio 2010 and I’m really excited for when it’s ready for prime time.