Good stuff. I switched from a long time C# guy at MS (pre .net 1.0) to Ruby / Mac about 5 years ago. Haven't regretted it, but still love to see what the team comes out with. Microsoft pumps a ton of money into their dev tools, and they produce a ridiculous amount of stuff at every release. And every once in a while, some technical gems break through.
Sounds like F# might be that thing this year. But will need to fire up the VMWare and get things installed to see.
The most notable features in Visual Studio 2010 in my mind are F#, a proper functional programming language, and ASP.NET MVC, which is ASP.NET that doesn't suck.
Funnily enough, both of them are available for VS2008 as well (although they're not shipped with VS2008) so if that's the only reason, you don't need to pay for the upgrade.
I would mention .NET 4 / C# 4, improved intellisense, multi-display support. I suppose the enterprise types will appreciate the new UML tools as well, personally however I try to stay away as far from UML as possible.
It stinks that we'll have to wait 2 months for the RTM version, but honestly, I don't mind waiting if that means Microsoft has the time to make more small improvements on a tool that I'll be using nearly-daily for the next 2-3 years.
I hope they improve performance further because VS 2010 slows down doing basic things on my machine which I originally intended to be a gaming machine.
I've been running beta 2 in a VM with ~1GB of RAM without too many problems. If performance increases, that'd be swell, but I don't think beta 2 is horrible.
I don't know why this is voted down, it's a valid concern. VS2005 had a ton of performance problems as well, which were fixed in VS2008. That, regardless of the speed of the machine you happened to be running it in. It was, for lack of a better term, unusable.
I sure hope VS2010 doesn't go down that road. There are only so many 'cool' features I'm willing to put up with before noticing the damn text editor can't keep up with me.
Sounds like F# might be that thing this year. But will need to fire up the VMWare and get things installed to see.