Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is now available for download if you’re an MSDN subscriber, and tomorrow (March 10) for everyone else.

The new or improved elements in SP1 are concentrated on better help, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, along with Silverlight 4 Tools, being included in the box. Unit testing support on .NET 3.5 and a new performance wizard for Silverlight are also among the additions.

For most developers, the more important feature of SP1 is the fact that it includes fixes for a long list of ‘issues’. You can read the full list fixes in this Visual Studio knowledge base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983509.

The improvements to help mean you can now view the help files locally, with the option to search locally installed content, look at a keyword index, and view favorites and history.

Microsoft has also released two new feature packs for MSDN Subscribers. The snappily titled Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack is intended to make life easier for organizations that want to share information between Project Server and Team Foundation Server.

The second feature pack is Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack. This lets you carry out web performance and stress testing with unlimited virtual users. You’ll need to be using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate to make use of the pack, but so long as that’s the case you’ll be able to simulate as many virtual users as you need without having to purchase additional Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 licenses.

A final announcement is that of Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2. As we’ve reported before, Visual Studio LightSwitch is designed to give a way to develop line of business applications for the desktop and cloud, and since the first beta was launched there have been over 100,000 downloads of the tool. Beta 2 will be available in ‘the coming weeks’, and will add support for Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

From March 8th, MSDN subscribers will be able to download and install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from their subscriber downloads.  If you're not an MSDN subscriber, you can get the update from March 10^th.

Related news:

LightSwitch - the developer's take

Books

Professional Visual Studio 2010

Practical Code Generation in .NET

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