Last week we shipped Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Express Tools. 

In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, SP1 includes a number of feature enhancements.  This includes improved local help support, IntelliTrace support for 64-bit applications and SharePoint, built-in Silverlight 4 Tooling support in the box, unit testing support when targeting .NET 3.5, a new performance wizard for Silverlight, IIS Express and SQL CE Tooling support for web projects, HTML5 Intellisense for ASP.NET, and more. 

TFS 2010 SP1 was also released last week, together with a new TFS Project Server Integration Pack and Load Test Feature Pack.  Brian Harry has a good blog post about the TFS updates here.

VS 2010 SP1 Download

Click here to download and install SP1 for all versions of Visual Studio (including express). 

This installer examines what you have installed on your machine, and only downloads the servicing downloads necessary to update them to SP1.  The time it takes to download and update will consequently depend on what all you have installed.  Jon Galloway has a good blog post on tips to speed up the SP1 install by uninstalling unused components.

Web Platform Installer Bundles

In addition to the core VS 2010 SP1 installer, we have also put together two Web Platform Installer (WebPI) bundles that automate installing SP1 together with additional web-specific components:

• VS 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle
• Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle

The above WebPI bundles automate installing:

• VS 2010/VWD 2010 SP1
• ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support)
• IIS 7.5 Express
• SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support)
• Web Deployment 2.0

Only the components that are not already installed on your machine will be downloaded when you use the above WebPI bundles.  This means that you can run the WebPI bundle at any time (even if you have already installed SP1 or ASP.NET MVC 3) and not have to worry about wasting time downloading/installing these components again.

Earlier this year I did two posts that discussed how to use IIS Express and SQL CE with ASP.NET projects in SP1.  Read the below posts to learn more about how to use them after you run the above bundles:

• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and IIS Express
• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and SQL CE for ASP.NET

The above feature additions work with any web project type – including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC.

Additional SP1 Notes

Two additional notes about VS 2010 SP1:

1) One change we made between RTM and SP1 is that by default Visual Studio now uses software rendering instead of hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP.  We made this change because we’ve seen reports of (often inconsistent) performance issues caused by older video drivers.  Running in software mode eliminates these and delivers consistent speeds.  You can optionally re-enable hardware acceleration with SP1 using Visual Studio’s Tools->Options menu command – we did not remove support for HW acceleration on XP, we simply changed the default setting for it.  Jason Zander has written more details on the change and how to re-enable HW acceleration inside VS here.

2) We have discovered an issue where installing SP1 can cause TSQL intellisense within SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 to stop working (typing still works – but intellisense doesn’t show up).  The SQL team is investigating this now and I’ll post an update on how to fix this once more details are known. 

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu