Visual Studio Decennial

No, that's not the name of a new feature coming in Visual Studio code name "Orcas" or Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario". March 2007 (March 19th to be exact) is the Visual Studio Decennial since it marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Visual Studio 97, the first release of Visual Studio. Microsoft PressPass has a page o'quotes from numerous Microsoft customers and partners (Comments on the 10-year Anniversary of Microsoft Visual Studio, March 2007), and Prashant Sridharan is celebrating the anniversary in his keynote this morning at VSLive! in San Francisco, where Sam Gazitt is making his on-stage debut.

Update: I'm happy to find a blog post by someone who attended the keynote. See Day 2, Keynote.

Ten years ago this month, the Internet start-up company I was at (IFusion) went belly-up. From there, I landed in my first role as a professional Visual Basic developer. Meanwhile, Microsoft released the first version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 97. I was largely unaware of it at the time as the Visual Basic project I joined was written in Visual Basic 3. My job was to move it to Visual Basic 4. My next set of projects were all in ASP, Visual Basic 5, or Visual Basic 6, which wasn't really incorporated into Visual Studio yet. In fact, I never actually used Visual Studio as a product per se prior to arriving at Microsoft.

Visual Studio has come a long way in that 10-year period. To see where it's going, at least for Team System, go see the newly published Team System Future Releases Roadmap.

Update: While you're on the Team System site, take note of the new coat of paint we gave it this weekend. We're still working through a refresh of the site, but this is a good start, I think.

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