VS2010 Beta 2 Hits the Street
Dave Mendlen sounded pretty jacked up on the phone on Friday. The senior director of developer marketing at Microsoft offered fresh details about the Visual Studio 2010 integrated development environment (IDE), which went to Beta 2 for MSDN subscribers earlier today. The general public will be able to download VS2010 Beta 2 bits on Wednesday, October 21. Mendlen also revealed that the final, shipping versions of VS2010 and .NET Framework 4 are scheduled for official release on March 22, 2010.
"We have reached the home stretch for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4," Mendlen enthused. "This release is the most significant update to our developer offering in recent years."
There's a lot to like about what Mendlen was saying last week. Perhaps most notable is the concentrated effort Microsoft put into improving the performance of the VS2010 IDE. Developers working with Beta 1 voiced significant concerns about the IDE's sluggishness and resource-hungry ways in testing, and Mendlen says the new beta addresses these concerns.
VS2010 didn't just get faster, it got simpler, too. VS2010 will come in four packages: Ultimate, Premium, Professional, and Professional without an MSDN subscription. Mendlen said customers found sifting through all the VS2010 packages "just too hard." Price-wise, expect VS2010 Premium to be consistent with the role-specific versions of Visual Studio 2008, such as Team Architect and Team Database. VS2010 Professional pricing is unchanged, but the Ultimate version will cost a bit more, Mendlen said, citing additional features and functionality for the increase. There are some promotions in place for dev shops willing to buy up to the next higher SKU, as well as an offer for Azure computing time.
If you're itching to learn more about the new beta, shuffle over to the SharePoint Conference 2009 Web site. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is giving the opening keynote at the conference and is expected to talk about VS2010 during his remarks. Also look for in-depth news coverage from Visual Studio Magazine Executive Editor Kathleen Richards.
I'm looking forward to hearing from developers their opinions of VS2010 Beta 2. According to Mendlen, the beta 2 code is feature-complete and ready for developers to start working against it.If you are working with the new beta bits, I'd love to hear your opinion. Drop me a line at [email protected].
Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/19/2009