For those who are following me on Twitter know how eager I was to get my hands on Visual Studio 2010 beta1. Today I downloaded it and installed it on my Windows 7 VM. This post is a random collection of my early observations. It is full of screenshots. Enjoy.

The start page had a new look. Visual Studio 2010 uses WPF for UI and you can see that WPF look and feel with those subtle animations.

This is what the Create New Project dialog looks like. You will notice that Visual Studio 2010 supports .Net Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0.

On this dialog you can also search for installed templates on your machine.

You can also browse through recently used templates and online templates. I assume that Microsoft will make more templates available online maybe through CodePlex or other community sites.

The toolbox looks same as Visual Studio 2008. I was expecting more new controls.

The code editor is now written in WPF and when you select text you get a nice WPF gradient effect.

Intellisense has become a little more intelligent. It filters the list based on the characters you’ve typed.

When debugging your code you will notice a new windows called Debug History. This is a full history of your current debug session. How many times has a method been executed or an event fired can be viewed here.

Visual Studio 2010 is packed with features which make this already great IDE greater. I will continue learning more about it and post whatever information I find interesting.