I heard that Beta 2 was ready today and I just had to give it a try. I’ve been using it for a couple of hours now and I was beginning to think that they had solved the Beta 1 issues that caused Visual Studio to crash left and right. Really, Beta 1 should have never been released; it was unusable.

Unfortunately, Beta 2 is still very buggy and prone to crashing, saying it is better than Beta 1 would be true, but it still has a long way to go. The IDE cannot handle large solution/project files very well at all. Beware of the Beta. I still plan on using it for a few more days to see if I can find a way around some of these issues, but I’m concerned about the quality, or lack thereof, in the first two beta releases. I’m not ready to declare Beta 2 unusable yet, but it is definitely not at the quality level that I would expect from Microsoft.

Dev Div has given themselves ample time to get the product fixed with March 22nd being set as the release date, but I really wish they would have learned a lesson from the Windows 7 team about QA and release schedules. A number of the features in 2010 sound great, but at this point my faith is waning that the team can release a solid product. We might have to wait out until the first service pack before we can consider taking our team to 2010 unless Microsoft does some serious clean-up on Visual Studio 2010.