Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

2009-10-19
2 minutes to read
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Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for MSDN subscribers, and generally available on October 21. I haven’t had a chance yet to play around with it, but some of the CLR changes that are very exciting to hear about are:

The new String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method indicates whether a string is null, empty, or consists only of white-space characters.
New overloads have been added to the String.Concat and String.Join methods that concatenate members of an IEnumerable<T> collections.
The String.Concat<T> method lets you concatenate each element in an enumerable collection without first converting the elements to strings.
The new Enum.HasFlag method determines whether one or more bit fields or flags are set in an enumeration value.
The Enum.TryParse<TEnum> method returns a Boolean value that indicates whether a string or integer value could be successfully parsed.
You can now easily copy one stream into another with the CopyTo method in classes that inherit from the System.IO.Stream class.
New Path.Combine method overloads enable you to combine file paths.
You can now parse System.Guid structures.
The new Microsoft.Win32.RegistryOptions enumeration lets you specify a volatile registry key that does not persist after the computer restarts.
Registry keys no longer are restricted to a maximum length of 255 characters.

I’m really looking forward to these improvements, particularly Enum.HasFlags, Enum.TryParse, String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace, Guid.TryParse, and Path.Combine(string[]). Of course, since some of these weren’t in Beta 1 (at least as far as I saw), it means revising some of the chapters for my book.