Is Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 stable enough to start a serious WPF 4.0 app?

Question

I'm about to start a new WPF project and there are a number of things in 4.0 that I need (multitouch for one). I've heard that VS 2010 beta 2 will be released at PDC in November so I'm considering starting the project in beta 1 now, then migrating to beta 2 when it becomes available. Assuming I only need to live with the environment for about 3 months would it be reasonable to start this project in VS 2010 beta 1 or is it not ready for daily development?

Answer 1

I've been doing a few things myself with .NET 4.0 recently, nothing major or for production, but it seems stable enough.

Though others may have had a different experience to me.

As it's beta software, I wouldn't recommend using it for Production purposes until it's fully released, or at the point of RC.

However, like I say, it seems to be stable enough in the .NET aspect of things, but I've not tpyed with WPF 4 yet so I would leave that decision up to you.

Answer 2

I'm not sure you're going to get the answer you're looking for here. In part because it's really hard to understand what you mean by "ready".

Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 is a beta product and hence will have beta issues. It will crash more often, have more performance issues, less features and generally speaking not as smooth of an experience as an RTM product would. That's essentially the definition of a beta.

But is it ready? I use it on a daily basis at home and work for essentially every project I work on (including those which ship on the 2.0 or 3.5 framework). Yeah I occasionally run into some annoying bugs. But nothing so severe that I stopped using the product.