Today Soma announced the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 Beta 2. Soma also added a little nugget of information around the ship date of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – March 22, 2010.
The Beta 2 bits are available today for MSDN Subscribers and general availability will be October 21st. It was also announced that Beta 2 comes with a “Go Live” license, which essentially states that Microsoft will provide a smooth upgrade path to the final release as well as provide support for the product.
Visual Studio 2010 is a huge undertaking. There are many enhancements not the least of which is a complete rewrite of the shell! There are also a number of improvements to the underlying .NET Framework to provide the means to build great applications on top of Windows 7. The first step for you is to download and install VS2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2. Brian Keller provides a nice walkthrough on how to download and install the necessary bits and get you up and running.
The next step is to download the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit and work your way through all of the great training content. In addition, I’d set aside some time to watch the series of 10-4 episodes on Channel9 and learn about all the new features in VS2010 and .NET 4.
From there, I’d ask that you report bugs and provide feedback on the Visual Studio Connect Site. With your feedback we can be sure that Visual Studio 2010 is the product that *you* demand on March 22, 2010.
Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a great enterprise-class source-control, collaboration and reporting system. Since its release in 2005, TFS has been knocked a little on its complexity and pricing. It has always been about “enterprise-class” and with that the requirements for the needs of enterprises provided a more complex solution that smaller teams couldn’t afford or administer.
The team behind TFS has finally addressed the concerns of smaller development shops with the announcement of TFS 2010 and its support for Basic installs.
What this means is…
- No requirement for SharePoint Services
- No requirement for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
- TFS 2010 can run on a local development machine running Vista or Windows 7 Home Premium and above
- TFS 2010 can run against SQL Express
The last piece of the puzzle is price. Although pricing hasn’t been announced yet, Brian Harry states on his blog that…
We’re not quite ready to announce the pricing and licensing for 2010 yet but I can tell you that it will be at least as easy and cost effective to get as SourceSafe has been. Stay tuned for more info on this.
This effort is more then just providing a great solution for smaller development shops. Its a roadmap to get those shops to migrate off of Visual SourceSafe and into the modern source management era with TFS 2010.
This week I am attending php|tek and while learning how to “Get it Done” from Wez Furlong, Soma announced on his blog that Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 (Beta 1) has shipped to the developer masses.
You can download the bits, submit feedback to the Connect site and participate in the ongoing conversations on the Beta forums. The documentation has been removed from the download for Beta 1 but you can find all of the documentation online on MSDN.
Once you kicked off the download, be sure to read What’s New in .NET Framework 4 and What’s New in Visual Studio 2010.
You can install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio or you can drop it into a virtualized machine with something like Virtual PC.
Once you have everything up and running, download the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit to learning about the latest features and enhancements. There are also a number of walkthroughs posted highlighting some of these new features.
Enjoy!
We’re starting to see Visual Studio Team System User Groups starting to pop up in our area. Chicago’s has a VSTS group (no group site just yet) and they’ve held twomeetings all ready (sorry for slacking on my blogging duties and not informing you in time that there was a group – a mistake I don’t plan to make again).
There’s also a group starting up in Indianapolis as a Special Interest Group of the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA). Their plan is to meet every 4th Wednesday of the month. Here are the details of their kickoff meeting on May 23rd…
When:
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 @ 6:00PM
Where:
Microsoft Corporation
Parkwood Business Park, Building Four
500 E. 96th St., Suite 460
Indianapolis, IN 46240
Click here to register
I’m catching up on my Inbox after my vacation from a couple of weeks ago and I ran across anemail from J.D. Meier and the announcement that the patterns & practices has released new perscriptive guidance for Visual Studio Team System.
This effort is in combination with customers, the product teams, the support teams, MVPs, subject matter experts and an internal field team called the “VSTS Rangers” to provide some guidance around everything that is Team System. Right now the content focus quite a bit on Team Foundation Server but the p&p team is working their fingers to the bone to punch outguidance as quick as possible for all aspects of Team System.
Some of the new content that has recently been released includes:
The VSTS Guidance Project is hosted on CodePlex.com which in and of itself is hosted on Team Foundation Server. Kind of a Circle-of-Life thing. Ok, maybe not, but great stuff anyhow!
Dave Bost is a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft and co-host of the Thirsty Developer Podcast.
