Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Microsoft has announced the availability of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers.
Microsoft will shed more light on Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and all of its other developer technologies at its upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) to be held in Los Angeles November 17-19
What’s New with Beta 2
With this release the Web Tools team has introduced a number of great improvements. A number of these improvements are listed below.
New Template

Using the default ASP.NET web site template, projects now come with a pre-configured site. This template configures your site to use master and content pages. In addition, it has styles pre-defined and controls for login, register and changing your password.

Silverlight 3 Tooling Support
While Dev10 tooling for Beta 1 has Silverlight 2 features that worked with Silverlight 3, Beta 2 now re-introduces all the Silverlight 3 features directly into Visual Studio.

Changes include:
  1. Support for configuring Out of browser (see screenshot below).
  2. Support for Transparent Platform Extensions.
  3. Page.xaml renamed to MainPage.xaml.
  4. Removal of support for Silverlight 
Parameterization of Web Packages 
VS will automatically parameterize the connection strings defined in the web.config and the destination virtual application name.  The users can specify customized parameters in parameters.xml file in the project directory as well, to parameterize configurations, such as WCF service’s end point etc. 

Import from web.config file for DB deployment Web application’s Deploy SQL property page provided a button “Import from web.config”, which will import the web.config connection string names to the connection list, with the connection strings as their package source.