If you haven’t seen from Soma’s or Jason’s blog, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is available today for MSDN Subscribers and will be available on Thursday for the general public. This service pack contains a lot of performance improvements and a new Help Viewer based on strong customer feedback. You can find out about more changes to the product in Jason’s blog post.

This release also marks a change in the deployment experience to provide customers a single download to update any products already installed on their systems. While VS2010 SP1 Beta is available for ENU and JPN customers, SP1 RTM will update all languages for our Express and box SKUs. With a single web  bootstrapper, you download only what you need to update any number of products in any shipping languages you have installed.

We will be supporting Beta to RTM upgrades for VS2010 SP1, so we encourage you to give it a try and provide your feedback on either the deployment experience or your experience using the updated Visual Studio 2010. I also welcome your comments below and encourage any Tweeters to tag comments with #vs2010sp1. We’ll be watching.