This post is a companion to a little article that I wrote for the UK MSDN Flash about Visual Studio 2010 with some resources to get you kick-started. It's not meant to be definitive.

What? You don't read the MSDN Flash? Sign up.

The first thing I'd say is that you need to take a look at this area on Channel9 and subscribe to it;

http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/

and also check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework V4.0 week here;

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-2010-and-the-NET-Framework-40-Week/

If you're looking for a CTP to download then you need to look here - it's in VPC form and it's big so download over a weekend or something;

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=en

and there's a preview of the VS 2010 Training Kit (demos, labs, presentations) which you can get from here;

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en

If you're looking at Visual Studio 2010 then here's some places I'd go to;

  1. Watch Jason Zander's keynote session at TechEd Europe
  2. Watch Scott Guthrie's keynote at PDC
  3. Take a look at what's coming for web developers with Jeff King at PDC
  4. Understand the new IDE customisation opportunities with Tim Wagner at PDC

If you want to understand the side-by-side story and features in the V4.0 CLR then;

  1. Check out the CLR Futures talk with Josh Goodman from PDC
  2. See where the type system is going with Andrew Whitechapel at PDC

If you want to check out what's coming in the languages with Visual Studio 2010 then;

  1. Listen to Anders Hejlsberg talk about C# 4.0 at PDC
  2. Listen to Paul Vick talk about VB 10 at PDC
  3. Listen to Luca Bolognese talk about F# at PDC
  4. Take a look at C++ in VS2010 with Boris Jabes at PDC

If you want to know more about what's coming in the .NET Framework 4.0;

  1. Parallel Programming
    1. Take a look at Daniel Moth's Parallel Extensions session at TechEd EMEA.
  2. WPF
    1. Watch the WPF Roadmap with Kevin Gjerstad at PDC
    2. Check out what's coming in XAML 2009 with Rob Relyea at PDC (not strictly WPF specific but a lot of fun nonetheless :-))
  3. WF and WCF
    1. Take a look at Workflow Foundation 4.0 with Kenny Wolf at PDC
    2. Look at the new model for Workflow activities with Matt Winkler at PDC
    3. Look at how WCF and WF come together with Ed Pinto at PDC
  4. Web
    1. Watch the ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap with Scott Hunter at PDC
    2. Watch the ASP.NET AJAX Futures session with Bertrand Le Roy at PDC
    3. Take a look at distributed web caching with "Velocity" with Murali Krishnaprased at PDC
  5. Data
    1. See where Entity Framework is heading with Tim Mallalieu at PDC
    2. Check out how ADO.NET Data Services becomes online/offline with Pablo Castro at PDC
  6. Office
    1. Deploying Office Applications with Sauurabh Bhatia at PDC
  7. Other
    1. Have a look at the Managed Extensibility Framework with Glenn Block at PDC


If you want to look at what Visual Studio Team System 2010 is bringing then;

  1. Watch Cameron Skinner take a Lap Around VSTS 2010 at PDC
  2. Walk through new VSTS 2010 features with Brian Harry at PDC
  3. Check out "Team Lab" with Ram Cherla at PDC
  4. Look at the new UML designers in VSTS Architecture Edition with Peter Provost at PDC
  5. Look at Agile development with VSTS 2010 with Sunder Raman at PDC
  6. Check out quality & diagnostics tooling with Habib Heydarian at PDC

If you've got through that little lot already you're quite some way ahead of me.