Updated October 21. The Beta 2 is now available to all.

MSDN Subscribers can now download Beta 2 of VS2010. Hooray. It will be available to everyone else shortly. The Visual Studio Developer Center has info on downloading and installing Beta 2 if you haven't gotten it yet.

With this version, VIsual Studio has a new look and feel beginning with the new icon!

The new splash screen is sophisticated looking.

(Pay no attention to the graphics from my Windows 7 background hanging below the edge)

The startup page is slick too and I like how things are organized. In VS2008, I changed my settings so that there was no start page but I may keep this one around.

But better than the pretty faces I was happy to see some new project types available!

MVC2 apps are now in the box! No more external downloads.

The Cloud service is not *quite* in the box. When you create your first new project you'll get prompted to install the Azure tools. Well at least you don't have to go find them and download them. :)

I've but this installation on another Windows 7 VHD. The other options were to put it directly on my computer (not quite as risky as with the Beta 1 but I'm still not ready) or to use a Virtual PC. I'm hoping that the VPC performance will be better than in the past but I don't feel like spending the time testing it out.

You won't find a 64 bit version of Beta 2 (here's why).

If you're an MSDN subscriber, go get it when you get the chance. If you have not played with any of the new VS2010 betas yet, there's a lot to see! If you're not a subscriber, the wait should not be too long for this to show up on the dev center.