I'm surprised that everyone seems so enthusiast with Windows 7. I'm quite enthusiast as well and I'm actually using it for a while but: is Windows 7 really great? I think it is just not a bad OS. When I compare with MacOS X Snow Leopard, the OS is certainly not the reason why Windows is still my main platform. If I wasn't a graphics programmer. I would not use Windows!
I'm using Visual Studio for all my developments, really everything! It's my main tool, I know how it behaves, I know how to tweak it and I know how to integrate external tools in it. I'm completely dependent on it which is quite an awful situation because on other platform I become inefficient!
Few days after the release of the new DirectX MSDN Developer Center, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available for everyone... obviously, I'm interested. I have quite skipped Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 provides some features I can't miss: Some support of C++ 0x.
When I tried Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 for the first time, I noticed that Visual Studio is now displayed in Direct3D... even on Windows XP! The interface has quite changed to become blue but there are some ugly effects especially for the code selection. It is such heavy software! The size of the download gives us a clue on that: 2.2 GB!
Since the first beta, the development team seems to have done quite a great job to optimize the interface, it is definitely smoother to use.
I notice a really great new feature: the possibility to grad a code window out of the main window. This is going to be great for multiple screens development!
My next step will be an evaluation of the compiler efficiency. It hasn't been great on that side for the past releases (up to Visual Studio 6!) when GCC continues to generate faster and faster code...