As announced on Soma’s blog this morning, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 have been released to MSDN Subscribers and will be available for everyone on Wednesday.

Visual Studio 2010 boasts a great new user interface with better contrast and lots of UI elements that tend to add confusion to the development process. It’s pretty amazing how getting rid of a few lines increases usability.

For developers redistributing the .NET Framework, perhaps the best news is how much smaller and faster runtime deployment is. Peter Marcu also describes robustness features added to .NET Framework 4 setup such as attempting to fix common problems and retrying installation automatically.

Check them out and give us your feedback on issues you find. We also have dedicated forums for more social interactions with both Microsoft employees and other community members.