Visual Studio 11 Beta

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There’s a been a flurry of information last night about Visual Studio 11 Beta and I’ve been trying to work through it to provide a summary of what’s been announced:

The “go-live” Beta will be available in 5 days time

Soma has announced that the Visual Studio 11 Beta (and .NET 4.5 Beta) will be released on the 29th February 2012 – 5 days time. The other noteworthy comment on the Beta is that “These releases will be “go live,” meaning they will enable usage in production environments”. For more details on “go-live” read this detailed article.

Visual Studio UI Changes

Jason Zander’s blog provides more details on the new clean, professional developer experience look and feel for Visual Studio 11:

If you want a more in-depth discussion and further screen shots of the new UI then the User Experience team blog discusses this in more detail.

Team Foundation Server 11 Express

Brian Harry has announced the introduction of TFS 11 Express. The key points are:

  • Free for up to 5 users, and includes
  • Source Control
  • Work Item Tracking
  • Automated Build
  • Agile Taskboard
  • Much faster and easier installation
  • TFS Integration in Visual Studio 11 Express products so you can access TFS from any Visual Studio 11 edition.

What you don’t get are SharePoint integration and reporting but you can upgrade to full TFS without losing data.

Visual Studio 11 Beta Product Lineup

The Beta product line up is explained at a high level (what are Ultimate, Premium, Professional and Express) here and in there is a more detailed matrix here. There’s a lot of new features and changes in what belongs in which edition in that matrix and we’ll start walking through some of these in future posts. In the meantime, watch out for the 29th Feb Beta release!

Cheers,
Giles