Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for general download for almost a week now.  The Beta of SP1 came couple of months back and it did a lot of performance enhancements, added support for HTML5 tags and few other stuff related to web development.  Now, the final release of SP1 is available.  The good part is that, if you had installed the SP1 beta, you don’t have to remove the Beta and start all over again.  You can apply the final release on top of the Beta and it works like a charm.

So, in simplified terms, what is new in Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Before I start listing it down, I was checking if there was an MSDN article available on this and found http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg442059.aspx 

While it reads (Beta), the same holds good for the release candidate as well.  Unlike VS 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 (which came together), this release doesn’t add any new project templates/item templates.

However, there are lot of enhancements related to Web Deployment, Debugging and Unit Testing for .NET 3.5 applications.

So, how does one find if you are running the correct version of SP1 final release.

While the SP1 Beta (Help – About Visual Studio) reads Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Version 10.0.3118.1 SP1 Rel, once you install the SP1 RTM release, it should read as below

The download link for SP1 Beta is here

Cheers!!!