Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 now available to MSDN developers
This weekend saw a blog post go up by Microsoft tools guru Jihad Dannawi who detailed the news that Monday May 18th is the launch day for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server editions to MSDN subscribers. The download will also be available to the general public this coming Wednesday May 20th.
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Image: Microsoft Visual Studio® 2010 First Look
The launch of this tools suite comes some five months after I interviewed Microsoft’s Jason Zander and Matt Carter for ZDNet.co.uk about the forthcoming release, which has been expected to feature a set of product enhancements focused on software developer needs arising from trends such as virtualisation, cloud computing and parallelism.
As expected, Microsoft is talking volubly on what it calls “democratisation” of the application lifecycle management process with this new product. Essentially, the company is aiming to delivers new capabilities for everyone on a project, including architects, developers, project managers and testers.
Jason Zander’s own blog specifies that as well as addressing much needed performance considerations, the company has taken direct feedback on the product’s presentation and functionality. Zander enthuses, “You spoke loudly and clearly that you didn’t like the triangle outline mode. Based on this feedback, the team actually changed this feature in mid-flight during Beta 1 to reflect your feedback: no more triangles!!”
Microsoft says that with the Visual Studio partner ecosystem, developers will now be able to work with IBM DB2 and Oracle databases in addition to Microsoft SQL Server databases. The company also states that with a regard to multi-core software development, they are aiming to simplify parallel programming so that both native- and managed-code developers can productively build applications.
From this point forward, developer speculation and interest may now gather for the next enhancements to the .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows Server "Dublin", which will reputedly include new workflow models, a new visual designer and better scalability while broadening Internet Information Services (IIS) to provide a standard host for applications that use workflow or communications.