Tablet, screen-reader, and multitouch developers should wait for an upcoming patch before installing Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate I downloaded and installed the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate last week with high hopes — finally, I’d be able to ditch Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005. After all, I was impressed by Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Alas, it was not to be. As I’ve mentioned before, I do my development on a quad-core Phenom desktop PC with both mouse and tablet input, running Windows 7. That gives me all the modern conveniences for both coding and testing applications that might be deployed on Tablet PCs as well as desktop and laptop PCs. It doesn’t let me simulate multitouch, but it’s as close as I can get right now on a desktop. [ Get an inside look at what to expect from Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 with Martin’s “InfoWorld preview: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 impresses.” ] As it turns out, that’s the perfect profile to trigger a major bug in the RC. I didn’t find out about the bug until after I’d scrubbed away all vestiges of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and installed the release candidate. Sure enough, my machine had it: Basically, every time I try to write code to create a new instance of a class, IntelliSense barfs and crashes Visual Studio. There is a work-around: I could uninstall my tablet and all tablet support. It’s not worth my time to do that, as I still have Visual Studio 2008 installed, and the patch to fix this is supposedly coming this week. Don’t let this happen to you, though. It’s no fun at all. [ Update 2/17: The promised patch does fix the problem. You can download it from here. ] Development Tools