Woman Reading News

Yesterday, Monday, September 29th, Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. For even more information on this, September 29th - October 3rd is Visual Studio Team System 2010 week on Channel 9.

Microsoft has been busy this week announcing exciting changes, and Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 is certainly at the top. It’s always very exciting when new versions of Visual Studio come out (or maybe that is just me).

It’s too early to tell everything that will be included in the final release. However, one would assume that final versions of things like ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 will be included. Personally, I would like to see the ASP.NET features to come earlier, especially ASP.NET AJAX. We haven’t had a new release for the ASP.NET AJAX since the 1.0 release. ASP.NET AJAX found in .NET 3.5 is really just the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Extensions that were bundled as part of the release. ASP.NET developers are starting to move more and more towards using things like jQuery. This doesn’t mean that most of us ASP.NET developers are giving up on ASP.NET AJAX just yet, but it doesn’t seem to be a good sign for the future of ASP.NET AJAX. I would hope and expect that we will see something similar as the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Extensions being released so that we can start using it before 2010.

The one exciting feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the enhancement in terms of testing; Visual Studio 2010 will come with a “black box”. Basically, you will be able to fully record what testers are seeing, this should make finding those tough errors a bit easier.

For right now, you can find some screenshots of the new version on the net. Channel 9 should have some videos posted later today. To get a hand-on experience, we will soon be able to check out a new CTP.

The official release date hasn’t been announced, but it is expected to ship in the first half of 2010.