Along with the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, we have released Visual Studio 11 Beta and Jason Zander has announced many of the great new and improved features in VS11 Beta.

We have also introduced a new setup experience with VS11.

Setup is built atop Burn, the Windows Installer XML engine, as well as the managed bootstrapper application (MBA) interoperability layer. This means that setup supports many of the features of Burn including package ref-counting, creating layouts for later installs, and build to build upgrades. We will highlight these features of setup more in our team blog.

If anyone installed VS11 Ultimate Developer Preview after the //BUILD/ conference, this experience should look somewhat familiar. Please note, however, that while we do support build to build upgrades going forward you will need to uninstall the Developer Preview first if you’re installing on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

So give VS 11 Beta a try and let us know if you find any setup issues on Connect that aren’t already listed in the ReadMe. We’ll cover more general topics in a future post on the team blog with details to follow here on mine.