Today, we’re excited to announce that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download.

Back in September, we announced the release of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and detailed the simplification efforts we made across the IDE, integration of the best and most popular features from the Productivity Power Tools and effort to improve project compatibility scenarios.

Since then, we’ve been busy improving and fine tuning experiences in Visual Studio and also addressing feedback and known issues from the Developer Preview. We’ve invested in performance improvements in the areas of responsiveness and memory utilization.

Take a look at what’s new in Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta on MSDN and for a more in-depth discussion, see Jason Zander’s discussion of the Beta release . We also encourage you to check out the new Windows 8 App Developer Blog to learn more about how to build great Metro style apps for Windows 8.

Last week, we revealed the new developer experience (in Part 1, Part 2) and showed you screenshots of the new user interface, iconography, search capabilities and how we’ve streamlined common workflows. Many of you had a lot of passionate feedback on these posts. We have read all the comments, and you will hear more about this from us soon. In coming weeks, we’ll be using this blog to talk about many of the other specific features of Visual Studio 11.

We Want Your Feedback!

Your feedback is an important part of our software development cycle. We review every comment that we receive and are constantly using this feedback to improve the product. Now that the Beta is available, we hope you will install and work with it, and continue to send us your feedback on how it all comes together.

If you encounter a bug or an issue, please report it through the Visual Studio, LightSwitch, and Blend Connect sites. We also want to hear your suggestions or feature ideas/improvements so please add your suggestions to UserVoice or vote on other user’s suggestions.

Enjoy!

The Visual Studio Team