Scott Guthrie announced it earlier. The much-speedier release candidate of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 is now available to download for MSDN subscription holders and will be available for everyone to download on Wednesday Feb 10. You can find download links here. Hurrah! One step closer to the full release in April.

Don’t forget that if you really want the best VS2010 you can get, you need to report bugs if you find any. If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site. It won’t take long and is always appreciated. There’s also an online survey you can fill out to express your overall thoughts about this release candidate. Again, any thoughts or notes will be well received.

Version 1.6 of BlogEngine.net, which runs this blog amongst many others, was released this morning. The two main new features are a centralised comment management system and multiple widget zones. Here’s the rest from the release notes.

• Centralized Comment Management
• Automated Comment Spam Filtering with ability to plug-in custom Filtering modules
• Multiple Widget Zones (details)
• Referrers data and Blogroll items now stored in Database when using the DB blog provider.
• Unsubscribe Link in Comment Notification Emails
• Referrer Data can be Stored for more than 7 days.
• Blogroll items can now be Ordered.
• Newsletter Widget more Intelligent - Emails sent when a post is going from an Unpublished to Published state.
• Twitter Widget - New options and improvements
• Page Slugs now saved in Database.
• New Logging system to Track events and errors.
• Unhandled Exception Handling
• Fixes to Comment Notification Emails not being sent out correctly in some cases.
• Outgoing Email improvements
• Many other improvements and fixes

Simple upgrade instructions are available here in the documentation. Congratulations to the whole team!

Virtual user groups continues to grow in popularity. MS dev teams have held live online chats for ages and both Second Life and ReactionGrid have hosted virtual user group spaces for a while now as well. Last year, .NET developers on LinkedIn started LIDNUG, an online user group that such luminaries as Scott Guthrie have already presented on, bridging the continents in one fell swoop rather than visiting Europe one day and India the next. And now we have VirtualDNUG.com, a new virtual user group being started up by Andrew Siemerof dotNetRadio.

I am finally going to put my full steam into setting up my VirtualDNUG users group.  With the help of the good folks over at ineta (they are providing a LiveMeeting license for us) I am hoping to host a great environment for learning.  I will probably start off with topics on ASP.NET MVC and the various side projects that surround that world (Turbine, Spark View Engine, FubuMVC, etc.) but I am totally open to just about any other cutting edge .net topics as well.

If you are interested in attending our initial meetings, would like to present, or have a topic that you would like to be covered, please contact me directly at asiemer@hotmail.com.

Is this another reason to sit in front of a screen of an evening? Yes. Is it another opportunity to try out presenting for those who want to? Absolutely, and with the added bonus that if the demo gods fail on you, you can blame LiveMeeting or the snow that’s currently hampering your broadband connection. Meanwhile, you’re talking to like-minded people around the world. Which is pretty cool.

Andrew is California-based so meetings may well be timed GMT+8. However, they can also be recorded so if you’re elsewhere in the world, this is not necessarily a problem.

Scott Hunter has announced a newly vacant Program Manager position on the ASP.NET team for anyone who would be willingly based in Seattle.

We are looking for someone that is interested in driving the data strategy on our team which includes partnering with LINQ and SQL teams, is into web standards around HTML, CSS and JavaScript and making ASP.NET work better with these standards and much much more. Please check out the listing if you are interested.

Scott Hanselman also tweeted about a vacancy for a developer to work on their new Orchard open source project. Less info here – adherence to agile methodologies, web standards, are key with MVC, Jquery and AJAX a plus.

Good luck if you decide to go for them.

Just a quick note to say that the more techy posts on this blog will now be cross-posted to the new blogs section on wrox.com where they have been kind enough to offer me a spot. Ah, the old connections die hardest.