Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 expected as soon as next week

One of the biggest questions at Microsoft’s TechEd conference this week — other than the whereabouts of popular speaker and former Microsoft security expert Steve Riley — is where is the beta of Visual Studio 2010.

A number of TechEd attendees have tweeted that they’ve been eagerly awaiting information on the beta of Microsoft’s next version of its development suite, but to no avail.

It sounds from a couple of my tipsters that the Beta 1 releases of VS2010 and .Net 4 are both likely to be made available for download sometime over the next couple of weeks, and possibly as soon as the week of May 18.

Update (May 15): Yes, VS 2010 Beta 1 will be available to MSDN subscribers on May 18, according to one Microsoft blogger. The public will be able to download Beta 1 of VS 2010 Professional, Suite and TFS on May 20.

Microsoft officials already have outlined broadly some of the new functionality expected in the VS2010 release, a product which many are expecting to ship in final form before the end of 2009. At TechEd this week, a few attendees mentioned additional specifics, such as the fact that Microsoft’s concurrent-programming language F# will ship in the VS2010 box, while Iron Python will “ship out of band, like F# does now.”

Another tweeter noted that the “Sharepoint TFS (Team Foundation Server) integration in VS2010 looks cool,” but developers will need an upgrade tool to move old 2008 projects into new templates.

I’ve asked Microsoft for an update on when to expect Beta 1 of VS 2010/.Net 4. If and when I get a response, I’ll add it to this post.

In related news, “Camano,” the testng tool being used and developed by the VS team, now has an official name: Microsoft Test and Lab Manager.