Visual Studio 2010 will ship on April 12th. We will be celebrating this HUGE release with a number of LIVE launch events taking place around the US as well as the World. The theme for this launch event is “Life Runs on Code”. We will have sessions covering  Application Lifecycle Management, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 development, Windows, Web as well as the recently announced Windows Phone 7 development all with Visual Studio 2010.

One of the first launch events will be taking place in Chicago on April 29th. I will be presenting the Web and Windows Phone 7 sessions in Chicago. We hope to see you there!

What: Visual Studio 2010 Launch (Chicago)

Where: Chicago Marriott Oak Brook, 1401 W. 22nd Street, Oak Brook, IL (map)

When: Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Register

These events are happening all over the US, for other cities, visit the Launch site. We are also hosting a number of smaller launch events. You can find a city near you by visiting MSDN Events.

Here are the resources I promised you from our recent MSDN Event series on Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, and SharePoint 2010. Leave a comment and let us know what future topics you would like to see.

Visual Studio 2010

What’s New in Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio on MSDN

Visual Studio 2010 Training Course on Channel 9

Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit

Visual Studio 2010 Tips & Tricks

Walkthrough: Debugging a Parallel Application

Web Deployment: Web.Config Transformation

Web Deployment in Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Studio Gallery

Visual Studio Extensibility

.NET 4.0

What’s new in .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 2

.NET Framework Client Profile

Entity Framework 4.0: Pluralization

Stephen Toub’s Session at PDC on Parallel Computing

Code Contracts (DevLabs)

What’s New in ASP.NET 4 and Visual Web Developer

ASP.NET MVC

Dynamic Data

.NET Developer Center

Data Developer Center

Concurrency (Parallelism)

WPF and Windows Forms

SharePoint 2010

Learn SharePoint 2010 on Channel 9

SharePoint 2010 Developer Center

The release of Visual Studio 2010 is right around the corner. For several months, developers have been plugging away at the Beta bits and we have received valuable feedback. Based upon that feedback, the Visual Studio team has decided to push out a Release Candidate (RC) that is now available for you to download.

Jason Zander provides some additional details regarding the RC…

We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses.  In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product.  Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.

You can now download the Visual Studio Release Candidate and continue to provide your valuable feedback.

Scott Guthrie is taking it one step further by inviting you to submit your feedback to the Visual Studio Connect website, but also sending him an email directly:

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix.  If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it.  I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

The team is also looking for feedback regarding the install experience as well.

Visual Studio 2010 is a MAJOR release. A number of items (based on customer feedback) has been ripped and replaced with leading-edge technologies. All of this effort to gain customer feedback is to make sure we’re ALL (Microsoft and the community of developers and users) is happy with this release. We all want a tool that is going to help us succeed in what we do – write software!

Go download the bits now!