Visual Studio 2010 Express Beta 2

I have been using the Visual Studio Express C++ IDE since the Vista launch a few years ago. I had my personal copy of Visual C++ 6 to code for personal entertainment but unfortunately Microsoft made sure that their own program would not run properly on Vista!

Thankfully, they made available the VS Express suites for free starting with 2005 and then they upgraded to 2008 which is most recent official release and available under Downloads at the VS Express website.  (The full VS2008 suite sells from about $250 to a few thousand depending on version.)

The Beta 2 version of VS2010 Express became available (again for free) from Microsoft at the end of October 2009. I played around a bit with it and though it seems like a potentially good upgrade. However, I soon realized that the Start Without Debugging option (Ctrl+F5) was not available which was rather painful for me. It looks cool though!

Today I installed the latest Beta 2 available at

http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#Visual_Studio_2010_Express_Downloads

and I found that that the Start Without Debugging option is fixed but there is another annoying thing! I wrote a couple of simple test programs and when I run them I get the following warnings in the output window:

'test100204.exe': Loaded 'C:\Users\George\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\test100204\Debug\test100204.exe', Symbols loaded.
'test100204.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\ntdll.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file
'test100204.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\kernel32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file
'test100204.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\msvcp100d.dll', Symbols loaded.
'test100204.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\msvcr100d.dll', Symbols loaded.
The program '[2624] test100204.exe: Native' has exited with code 0 (0x0).

It seems that it is trying to load some .pdb file associated with some .dll and cannot find them! The program runs and executes properly but I do not like to receive warning messages for no reason. No such issues with VS2008.

I guess I would have to wait for the official release.