Rather than making those upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 wait until 2011 for a useful title to be published, Microsoft Press has provided access to digital versions. It has actually been available for some weeks - but we missed it and you might have too.

If you are a .NET developer migrating to Visual Studio 2010 from an earlier version the ebook Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, available in .xps and .pdf formats might be useful.

It has been written for three different groups of upgraders, according to their prior experience, with separate parts for each of them.

Part I is for those moving from Visual Studio 2003,

Part II is for those moving from Visual Studio 2005 and

Part III is for those moving from Visual Studio 2008.

The book takes a "hands-on" approach. Each part has the same four chapters and uses the same sample application (the code for which is down-loadable).

More information and the download links are available on the MSDN Blogs site.

As we reported in Free book on Windows Phone 7 by Petzold , this isn't the only free ebook that Microsoft Press is currently offering. It isn't clear why free ebooks are in vogue but the trend does seem to prove that there are just a few free lunches....