As I mentioned before, I historically have avoided beta software. However, this time I am breaking that rule and really digging into VS2010 early. Below are a few of the things which have me very excited to see this release (and with Web Spark, I get it for free! Join now!) This is part one of a multi-part entry of the things I find really appealing about the upcoming version of Visual Studio 2010.

IntelliTrace – allows you to playback and trace a session to assist with debugging. The major features are:

• Application Event Recording
• Playback Debugging (a.k.a Time Travel Debugging)
• Record and Playback of Manual Test Failures
• Debugging Build Acceptance Tests
• Diagnosing Unit Test Defects
• Debugging Load Test Failures

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/habibh/archive/2009/06/02/an-in-depth-look-at-the-historical-debugger-in-visual-studio-2010-part-i.aspx

Auto-Start applications – Helps mitigate large startup processes which may run during the web application “Application_Start” event. Provides a controlled approach for starting up the application.

Link: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/15/auto-start-asp-net-applications-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx

Better ViewState management – By default, ViewState is enabled for web controls in past versions of ASP.Net. In VS2010, ViewState can be disabled by default and onlt enabled for those that actually need it, and it now supports “inheritance” through the ViewStateMode property. This allows you to set it to “Inherit” the value from the parent control.

Link: http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet4/

Outut Caching everywhere  -- Now you can take advantage of caching in applications other than web based, as the cache API is exposed without using the System.Web.Cache in a WinForm application. There are also more providers, and the ability to create your own through extensibility.

Link: http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet4/

Reduced web.config size – Most of the configuration settings have been moved to the machine.config file, which greatly simplifies the configuration settings in the web.config file.

Link: http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet4/

Get the VS2010 Beta 2 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx