Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available in beta. It fixes some things, causes problems with others, and is no faster than before. MSDN subscribers can download it today and the rest of us gain access on December 9th.

It comes with a "go-live" licence so you can issue anything you create using it.

New features include:

Local Help Viewer

If you find the current VS help difficult and unreliable then there is help for Help in the form of a local Help Viewer. It has old style table of contents, keyword index and more.

Extended platform support

The key update is the inclusion of Silverlight 4 tools as standard. Remarkably there are some Windows 7 additions to the MFC APIs to support Direct2D, DirectWrite adn Animation technologies. There is also a new performance Wizard for Silverlight.

Unfortunately there are also some problems. Currently the SP1 beta stops Razor IntelliSense working in ASP .NET MVC 3 RC and it stops the Async CTP tool working.  Both problems are due to be fixed soon.

It is also stated that many bugs have been fixed but there is no central list of the fixes included in SP1. Of course SP1 does very little if anything for the big complaint that most VS users have - it is slower than VS 2008 and this is usually attributed to the switch to using WPF to implement its UI.

More Information

A link for general download will be available on 9th December.

Further Reading

LightSwitch - the developer's take

Microsoft Lightswitch Beta ships early - First Look

Free Visual Studio shortcut posters

Microsoft WebMatrix and Razor

Microsoft releases new tools for Visual Studio 2010

Books

Professional Visual Studio 2010

Practical Code Generation in .NET