Software, Technologies and Gadgets

Visual Studio 2010 beta and .NET Framework 4 beta two have been released to MSDN subscribers with everyone else getting code on October 21.

Also, Microsoft will announce Visual Studio 2010 will officially launch on March 22, 2010.

There will be four Visual Studio SKUs: Development Edition, Database Edition, Architect Edition and Test Edition.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional minus the MSDN subscription will feature core developer features, the integrated development environment, platform support and parallel debugging. With the MSDN sub, you’ll actually get the current and previous client and server operating system runtimes.
Premium will include code analysis, database deployment, user interface testing and test impact analysis. The addition of the MSDN sub will give you the server platforms for Dynamics, SharePoint and Exchange, plus Office, Expression and some Team Foundation Server features.
Ultimate will include all these features, plus UML tools, historical debugging, manual testing products and load testing along with the full Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server.

Source: The Register

Update: Microsoft also published a Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – October Preview which you can download here
A training kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize a variety of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 technologies.

The Beta 2 release of the Training Kit contains 15 presentations, 19 hands-on labs, and 13 demos. Many technologies are covered in this release, including: C# 4, VB 10, F#, Parallel Extensions, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow, Windows Presentation Foundation, ASP.NET 4, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, Managed Extensibility Framework, and Visual Studio Ultimate.
Here you can see the list of presentations, labs and demos.