Recently announced was the release of Visual Studio 2010 which is next in the line of authoring tools from Microsoft, following the suite of web design, development, programming and application development. Visual Studio 2010 is to boast an enhanced IDE, additional functionality, smarter intellisense, faster application production and lots more. But, as with many Microsoft applications, will we find ourselves wrapped up in multiple security updates, program patches and compatibility options? Or will Microsoft’s attempt go without flaws? Well, unfortunately, many users of the Beta, Beta 2 and RC candidates have been hit by instability issues and application failiures.

Even after our initial download of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 ISO, we began to encounter problems, firstly with components in the installation failing, and problems with trying to install the components externally. We loved the fact that .NET 4 was included, but we didn’t like the fact that it left previous installations of .NET remaining, even with compatibility issues.

After a reboot, we selected the IDE from the programs menu, and selected our most frequent preference for GUI and development, only to meet a dead end with the dreaded “Application cannot start” error. Re tried another reboot, but to no avail as the application still refused to open.

After searching multiple forums, and resources, we come across a command, which is run from the RUN Dialog, namely devenv /resetsettings, which allowed us to go back to the GUI selection, however, upon selecting a different preference, we were greated by the same issue.

We tried re-installing, repairing the installation, we even uninstalled .net and re-installed it, yet the problem didn’t sub-side.

We tried again with the anti-virus disabled, firewall disabled, still no luck, and after another tedious search we found a page on the Microsoft website with a solution.

The solution recommended multiple options depending on the error, we tried them all, nothing worked, which left us quite frustrated that we could not get a preview of the new platform. We thought it was even more obsurd that the same problem occured on our laptops, that had clean installations.

It seems that other issues contribute to this problem such as the removal of font support for a number of true type fonts.

These issues one on top of another do not convey a positive start for VS2010, and, as a recommendation, we recommend that users stick with their current version of Visual Studio until these intial bugs have been ironed out from the RTM version of the product, which is due for release in April 2010.

We think that the main issues are compounded by the new components that run around the visual studio platform, at some point, we have all come across runtime issues with applications, especially those that run on the .NET framework, and we all know about compatibility problems between .NET installations along with their counterpart resources. One of the issues with the .NET platform remains with the MSXML library, which is a recommendation for repair from Microsoft.

We think that these components should check for incompatible installations and resources before the application is installed, much like Windows 7 & Vista do with incompatible programs, this may help to solve alot of the bugs that contribute to a bad name.

We liked the installations simplicity, and its speed, but again, the failiure of essential components should have rolled back the installation rather then letting the application remain on the test computer.

Once we manage to get a copy of VS 2010 up and running, we will provide solutions on how to fix these bugs.

Good luck!