Delayed Visual Studio 2010 RC due this week

The delayed next edition of Microsoft's Visual Studio is due as a release candidate by the end of this week.

The release of Visual Studio 2010 was announced on the Visual Studio Lab Management team blog here, with the news the Lab Management RC would also be available later this week.

According to the blog: "We have taken a lot of your feedback on Beta2 and incorporated that into RC. Thanks for your feedback!"

Changes follow criticism of the pre-release Visual Studio 2010 code, criticism that saw Microsoft forced to build the RC to provide room for additional testing. Plans for the RC were announced in December 2009, with delivery due in February - that pushed out the initial planned release of Visual Studio 2010 from March to April 12, 2010.

Senior vice president of Microsoft's developer division Soma Somasegar said in December that Microsoft had "significantly improved performance" between the first and second betas but that "based on what we've heard, we clearly needed to do more work."

Somasegar said beta testers had complained of performance problems, especially on virtual memory use, while commenters on his blog talked about crashes when using XAML, Silverlight, and native 64-bit applications.

All-About-Microsoft blogger Mary-Jo Foley, meanwhile, uncovered this blog from a member of Microsoft's Visual Studio QA team who said that between the first and second betas "it became painfully obvious that the new VS had an obesity problem."

Kirill Osenkov complained of memory leaks and the fact that Visual Studio 2010 had to load the Common Language Runtime and Windows Presentation Foundation at application start up.

Visual Studio 2010 was "slow, consumed a lot of memory and the worst thing, with enough modules loaded it stopped fitting into the 2GB address space on 32-bit machine," Osenkov wrote at the weekend. ®