The past couple of days I have been testing Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 Team System and have quickly realized that it is highly unstable and contains many frustrating bugs. If you are thinking about starting to use Beta 1, I would highly suggest holding off until Beta 2. Visual Studio 2010 appears to be in worse shape than the early releases of Vista; the complete opposite of my experience with the Windows 7 Beta release I might add.

So what have I seen that has caused me to come to the above conclusion:

1. Random crashes where Visual Studio disappears without a trace, no error messages. I have seen this several times converting solutions and projects from 2008 format to 2010, as well as, in the middle of compiling solutions.

2. C++ projects appear to be defaulted and fixed at “.NET Framework 4.0” which then causes it to be incompatible with 3.5 projects.

3. I have seen odd errors with project references not being picked up. I still have not gotten to the bottom of this one, although some of it is related to #2.

4. The Errors window does not always clear out between builds, leaving one thinking there are still errors after a successful compile.

5. Changes to Target Framework in Project Properties do not always save.

6. Project properties will not display at all for some normal C# assemblies.

I have every confidence that the DEV team at Microsoft will address these issues and many of the others, but for now, the Beta release of Visual Studio 2010 just is not ready for any real use other than playing around. It’s a Beta so that is to be expected. I just got my hopes up after how well Microsoft did with their Windows 7 Beta.