After a surprise comment to a three year old posting I realized that I have gotten sloppy, since I used to post about Visual Studio beta and service pack releases. Since Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 just came out I thought it would be a good opportunity to pick up that old tradition again.
Visual Studio has become much more than the development environment it used to be when Microsoft released the first version of Visual Studio .NET in 2002. After losing the .NET moniker with the release of Visual Studio 2005 the number of different editions dramatically increased, the flagship model now being called Visual Studio 2005 Team System Team Suite, and it gained a real source control system in the form of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The different product editions lived on in Visual Studio 2008, which still came with a plethora of editions lead by the flagship Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite edition (depending on where you look Microsoft apparently couldn’t make up their mind on where to put the year in the product name).
For 2010, Microsoft decided to shed some weight and reduced the number of editions to three (four if you count Express), and it is also losing the Team System moniker, which shortens the name simply to
So I said above that Visual Studio has become much more than just the development IDE, so what else is there? Well, how about this:
Most of these products are available in x64 and x86 flavors, depending on what OS version you are running, and all of them are supported up to and including Windows 7 of course. Curiously the F# Runtime download is only available on MSDN, but don’t worry, it is of course included in all Visual Studio 2010 editions already (with the exception of Express I believe).
One of the most notable new features in Beta 2 has to do with Team Foundation Server, it now ships with a Basic configuration option that allows installation on client operating systems. The installation has also been extremely streamlined, so no longer do you have to wade through pages of pre-requisites and set up a whole fleet of virtual machines, you can simply drop it onto your Windows 7 client box and try it out! Brian Harry describes it all in detail here.
If you are interested in any of the other feature enhancements of Beta 2 or Visual Studio 2010 in general check out the detailed descriptions on Soma’s Blog, Brian Harry’s Blog, Paul’s Blog and Scott's Blog, and did I already mention Beta 2 comes with a Go Live license?
The final release for Visual Studio 2010 and all related components is expected to take place on March 22, 2010. I’ll post more details as they become available!
posted @ Wednesday, October 21, 2009 2:45 PM