Yesterday Visual Studio 2010 RC was released to MSDN Subscribers (find the link here), tomorrow it’s available for download for everyone. The performance is great as far as I can say by using it for at least one day. But it lacks on support for Silverlight 4 Beta.

If you’re developing Silverlight 4 applications, it is recommended that you stay on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 until new bits of Silverlight come out. “New bits of Silverlight” means a Silverlight Release Candidate. It is expected also for this month. Wow, how the time is ticking away. I just thought it has been some days ago since I read Dr. Tim Sneaths post about the Silverlight 1.0 RC, and now we’ll have the 4.0 Release Candidate soon.

The more I work with Silverlight 4.0, the more I love this Plugin. While I missed some things like e.g. implicit Styles and basedOn Styles in version 2.0, version 4.0 now contains both of them. Also printing is supported, WebCam- and Microphone-Access, Com-Interop for Out-Of-Browser apps etc. And the most important aspects for Business-Apps, Data-Access, Validation etc. are easy to do. With WCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) you’ve a great framework for building Business apps. Also I’ve to say that I’m a total fan of the REST-based WCF Data Services (formerly ADO.NET Data Services), which are now also included in Sharepoint 2010. Silverlight contains a small Client API for accessing those services and make the classical CRUD-operations.

Silverlight 4.0 contains many great features to build really powerful apps. But not yet with Visual Studio 2010 RC. As soon as the new Silverlight-bits will be available, you’ll read it here.