Microsoft has released the .NET Framework 4 Beta along with Visual Studio 2010 Beta.

Both has a lot of revamps and Visual Studio 2010, in particular, has gone thru a major UI update. Thanks to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) now you can do a lot more of developer friendly work with Visual Studio 2010.

Some of the feature sets include,

* Clear UI Organization
* Reduced clutter and complexity
* Improved editor
* Better support for floating documents and windows
* Enhanced document targeting
* Focused animations for action feedback
* IDE support for parallel programming
* Native C++ libraries that use lambda functions and align well with STL
* Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework offers support for imperative data and task parallelism, declarative data parallelism, and more
* Resource management of the multicore hardware and task scheduling enabled by Concurrency Runtime
* Parallel debugging windows and profiling views
* Discover existing code assets with the new Architecture Explorer
* Design and share multiple diagram types, including use case, activity and sequence diagrams
* Tooling for better documentation of test scenarios and more thorough collection of test data
* Run tests impacted by a code change with the new Test Impact View
* Gated check-in, branch visualization and build workflow allow for enhanced version control
* Contextual support helps developers better understand existing code – and write new code more efficiently
* First class C++ development experience that helps developers navigate and understand complex C++ source bases
* Build new Windows® 7 applications or upgrade existing applications
* Enable Office tools to make your solutions more flexible and productive for specific needs
* A high-performance and standards-compliant JavaScript IntelliSense® engine
* “One Click Deployment” that quickly publishes files and configuration settings from development machines to the final deployed site
* Full support for Silverlight™ for cutting-edge, rich Internet applications
* C# and VB Project Templates for building Cloud Services
* Tools to change the Service Role configuration
* Integrated local development via Development Fabric and Development Storage services
* Debugging Cloud Service Roles running in the Development Fabric
* Building and packaging of Cloud Service Packages
* Browsing to the Azure Services Developer Portal

[Quoted from Microsoft]

Download Visual Studio 2010 (it comes with .NET Framework 4)

Technorati Tags:
Microsoft, Visual Studio, .NET, .NET Framework