New Visual Studio 2010 + MSDN Packages Offer More Value

Article
10/20/2009

Microsoft is making updates to the MSDN website and subscription details/benefits to better meet our customers’ needs. Microsoft is adding new benefits including complimentary e-learning, Azure compute hours and Team Foundation Server.

For more information, see Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta.

What’s New in Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated environment that helps simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Now, developers and testers can:

Unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, modeling and design tools that bring vision to life
Personalize their environment and target a growing number of platforms, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, Microsoft SharePoint and cloud applications that accelerate the coding process and allow developers to use existing skills
Work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that let you find and fix bugs quickly and easily and help ensure high-quality solutions.

Top new features that make Visual Studio 2010 a great investment for organizations include those to:

Ensure Quality Code: New features like IntelliTrace give testers and developers options for manual and automated testing as well as advanced debugging tools for maintaining source code and finding bugs.
Increase Simplicity through Integration: Significant enhancements to the IDE and editor such as “Generate from usage” mean that whether modeling, coding, testing or debugging, developers can use existing skills to deploy a growing number of application types.
Unleash Creativity: New drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and WPF, built-in tools for Windows 7, SharePoint, and integration with innovative technologies (such as those for the database, UML, Expression, ASP.NET MVC, and multi-core) allow developers to bring their visions to life.

The official launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is March 22, 2010.

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 will be available to MSDN subscribers today with general availability on October 21.

Simplified Visual Studio Product Line

The product line has been simplified to make it easier to select the right Visual Studio edition for your developers. Each level has benefits depending on the specific developer need. Going forward, customers will be able to choose from three main versions of Visual Studio 2010:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN is the comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for teams to ensure quality results from design to deployment.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN is a major product upgrade. Not only do customers receive a robust solution for ALM including all “role” SKUs, but the new version brings in significant innovations, including:

New Architecture tools (including new UML assets) that transfer your architecture from whiteboard to living assets
New tools that enable testing teams to capture rich and actionable bugs at different points in time
New testing tools that bring business users, test generalists and others into the process
A world class Integrated Development Environment that enables the development across multiple platforms, including the cloud
With the highest level of MSDN subscription, all of Microsoft’s server and client applications for development & test usage

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN is a complete toolset for developers to deliver scalable, high quality applications.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN is the essential tool for basic development tasks to allow developers to implement their ideas easily.

Pricing, More Information

Microsoft is maintaining prices on the new Visual Studio Professional and Premium products, even though there is vastly increased value in both. We are increasing the price of the new Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN product; we think our customers will find that it is a tremendous value for their investment with an incredible amount of new functionality within this major product release, including tools to enable better collaboration, to build powerful next-gen applications and to increase the automation and ease of testing.

After March 22, 2010, it’s important to note that the only price adjustment of approximately nine percent will be made to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN—all other product pricing remains flat. We’re encouraging customers to buy now to take advantage of the “Ultimate Offer” and flat pricing before launch.

For more information on SKU specifics, and information about other available Visual Studio products (such as Team Lab Management), see Visual Studio.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation