Is Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 usable?

Question

Half a year ago, I tried Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, but it was still way too buggy for production use.

However, I really like some of the new features - Should I bother installing Beta 2 or is it still too buggy?

Answer 1

It's a little bit buggy but it is a lot better than Beta 1 - the best thing I can tell you is to download it and run it through its paces.

I have experienced a few freezes and crashes but beyond that things are running quite smoothly.

Answer 2

I've been using it for a while and it seems solid to me. From past experience with MS betas I usually find the betas tend to be quite stable compared to most other company betas.

In the end though, it is just a beta so it shouldn't really be used in a production environment - it's just to wet your programming taste buds so you'll want to fork the cash up in March 2010 ;)

Answer 3

It's fairly usable - but it can be slow (that's down to the fact that it's loaded with debug and trace info to help analyse any crashes). If you've got Win7 installed, install it into a VHD - you'll find this helps because you can quickly wipe it and reinstall into a clean image. If you haven't got Win7, look into one of the Virtual Machine implementations out there.

Answer 4

It looks good i ve been using it for a week now it doesn't crash or anything but sometimes it stops responding for few seconds(when you try to add a new project or add reference for the first time ...) one more thing i lost intelisense once but after restoring the settings it woked just fine.

i also tried VS2010 CTP and Beta 1 this one is way better ...

Answer 5

I've been using Beta 2 for my personal projects since it came out, and it's been a massive improvement over Beta 1. I wouldn't suggest using it for production code (of course, it's a beta), but the improvements over Beta 1's performance and stability are too extensive to list.

I did notice one MS blog mention that there are apparently some lingering issues with performance linked to WPF and drivers that do not properly support pixel shader 2.0.

Answer 6

I've been using VS 2010 Beta 2 on Windows 7 x64 for two weeks.

Here's what I've found so far.

1. Cannot debug JavaScript from within VS 2010. A "Disassembly" tab pops open instead. (ASP.Net MVC 2). Found this link which indicates I'm not the only one. Firebug is excellent but slower response time.
2. "Type or namespace name '..' could not be found" message in a small app I created to test some LINQ to SQL code.
3. I also found this: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Still Very Unstable

Although I don't want to I will have to go back to VS 2008

Answer 7

I found it usable. The WPF designer was unstable, crashing as I typed in XAML. Outside of that, I haven't had any negative experiences, which is much more than I can say for Beta 1.

Answer 8

IMHO VS 2010 beta 2 hangs too often (when editing xaml code particularly) and for me is absolutely unusable.

Answer 9

I've been using the beta 2 since it was released, and for my webforms project it works quite stable.

I do however not use any of the team tools, except the database project type. E.g. I use NUnit for unit testing. So I basically use VS as an editor and debugger.

However, combine it with ReSharper 5.0 (which is pre-beta) I get occasional hangs when editing .aspx and .ascx files.

Answer 10

Edit - False alarm - still excruciatingly slow. anyone know how to fix this?

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My XAML editing had an excruciatingly frustrating delay until i disabled Edit and Continue. I've only used 2010 for Silverlight 4 Beta so thats my environment.

What would happen is EVERY time I went back to the editor after launching my silverlight application it would take 5-10 seconds to let me edit the XAML. Yes XAML. Not the designer - the XAML.

This delay would occur whether in debug or run mode and did not make any difference whether or not the window was still open - OR how long it had taken me to click back on the VS2010 window. it was like the first time my cursor went back to VS2010 it was compiling my code 10 times over.

As soon as I disabled ENC it would allow me to instantly update the XAML on returning to the editor.

NB. i suspect it may only be necessary to disable 'enable precompilation' but I didnt try that yet

Answer 11

Not usable. It crashed constantly on UI stuff. Non-UI stuff it was fine. How to report bugs isn't obvious so I never felt I was contributing to the process. I went back to VS 2008 after less than a day.

Answer 12

The release candidate is due here in feb.
I take it your question is actually if you should spend the time on installing it and playing around with it... If so, then wait a few more days.

Answer 13

I've been using it quite a bit. I've got it installed on 3 computers and two of those installations have something odd going on with them:

1. Home laptop: works fine, slow but fine (due to snafu only has 1 GB of memory with XP)
2. Work desktop #1: works fine except the built in development web server randomly stops responding somewhere around the 5-10 minute window -- doesn't matter if debugging is active (XP)
3. Work desktop #2: Windows 7 x64 works fine except the development web server is very sluggish compared to the XP desktop even though it is a quad core machine with 8 GB of RAM -- there is hard drive activity on each page access and it feels like more than just logging activity

The installer is buggy. If you don't have the ISO image mounted on reboot, it tries to run vs-setup.exe or similar instead of setup.exe when installing Visual Web Developer. Install requires a reboot part way through so either use a persistently mounted ISO image (couldn't find one that would do that for Windows 7) or burn it to disk.

If working on an XP machine, be sure to install the Windows 7 Automation UI optional update from Windows Update. It greatly improves the GUI responsiveness on XP (not sure if it is needed on Vista).

I'm using it full time for real work but it is buggy...