Yet another major release with the occasion of the Los Angeles Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) drops into developers’ laps. After the tech demo of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft code dumped Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.

Even though Visual Studio 2008 has only been released earlier this year, Microsoft wastes no time and is working on a new version. The corporate vice president for Microsoft’s .NET Developer division, Scot Guthrie was the one to introduce the new releases at the second day of PDC, and he too discussed Microsoft’s transition from traditional client relations to cloud-based services.

According to Guthrie, Visual Studio 2010 was built using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Microsoft library for rich visual displays. The result, Guthrie says, is an interface flashier than we’re used to where humble compilers are concerned. Visual studio 2010 will also feature multi-monitor support, as well as ‘richer’ code editing and visualization.

Visual Studio 2010 and the 4.0 release of .NET Framework will contain programming models for parallel programming. This is a sine qua non feature considering the increasing occurrence of multiple core processors, because the chips aren’t getting faster, they’re just adding more cores.

Certain applications in particular do well with parallelism, being designed so that multiple parts of the software are executed simultaneously. A feature called concurrency is therefore going to be added to .NET framework libraries to allow native C++ applications which execute code efficiently on a parallel hardware model.

According to Guthrie, .NET 4.0 will be built with enhanced features of the WPF, including multi-touch and Deep Zoom support, dynamic language runtime support, and support for static programming languages like Java and C#. Guthrie also said that CLR2 and CLR4 will now run in the same address space.

Both the new Visual Studio and .NET 4.0 also allow for customization of the widgets on applications, and use of the Ribbon User Interface introduced for the first time in Office 2007. Multi-touch support is similar to that found in Windows 7 and Microsoft Surface, the Redmond-based company’s table PC.

The Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 are available for download from the joint portal shared by both products.

The CTP is available as a 7.5 GB virtual PC image that is downloaded and run on a host computer by means of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, the company’s virtualization software. It contains VS2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 as well as Team Foundation Server 2010, Windows 2008 server as a Guest OS and SQL Server 2008, all of which are very early technology demos meant for evaluation and feedback. As such, there are a number of Walkthrough scenarios included with the Virtual PC and which showcase the so-far completed features.