In a very small announcement by Developer Division’s Marketing and Communications Manager Rob Caron, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is set to be officially launched April 12, 2010 and not March 22 as previously announced. However, the date for release to manufacturing (RTM) still remains unknown.
Historically, RTM for Visual Studio has been months ahead of the official launch. Visual Studio 2008 as an example was RTM November 19 2007, but officially launched February 27 2008, 3 months later.
Scott Guthrie reported late last year that Visual Studio 2010 is postponed because of performance issues found in Beta 2 and revealed plans for an intermediate release in February:
…we plan to make a Release Candidate build available in February that everyone will be able to download and test. It will be a public build and include a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment.
Taking into account that the official release date is now April 12 and the RC is in February, the date difference between the official release and the RTM is probably much closer than for previous releases of Visual Studio.