Overview of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
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Many users didn't consider the most recent version of Microsoft Visual Studio to be a serious upgrade over the previous one. Sure, it held your attention if you were interested in the .Net framework, but otherwise, it seemed as if the only thing that changed was the number. Now we're getting up to 2010; is Microsoft doing the same thing, or is this version really new? Keep reading for a review of the first beta.
Every software development company periodically updates its software and brings out a new version. You can observe this as a buyer via a higher number or later year tagged onto the end of the product name. New versions can dramatically improve the software. They are supposed to both introduce new technologies and reinvent old ones in order to improve them.
However, sometimes this is also used as a marketing gimmick, fooling users into buying/upgrading to the new product, which still does the same thing in the same fashion. The Visual Studio franchise, with its last releases, ended up doing just this unless you were interested in the upgrades to the .Net framework. Now Visual Studio 2010 promises to put an end to this complaint. The question is, can it succeed?
It is a fact that if you were, for example, a C++ developer using version 6, excluding some minor library extensions, not much changed in the way you wrote code and debugged it. With the introduction of the .Net framework in Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, Microsoft did nothing other than redesign the look, leaving the core of how things work exactly the same.
As a bonus, a couple of new bugs were present as well. One of the most cursed was the inefficiency of the Intellisense technology. According to an interview with an MS spokesperson, Visual Studio 2008 had approximately 14,000 customers and 500,000 clients. Now that is a large enough market to make it worthwhile to bring out something revolutionary, convincing customers to buy the new version.
Under this circumstances, the marketing action to present Visual Studio 2010 as the new six is understandable. Version six was probably the most solid one, and 10 promises to deliver the same, with an improved design and optimized technology to power all this. In May 2009, Microsoft released the first beta that everyone can download at the official page here.
This is the perfect time to see if this new version manages to deliver on a long list of promises. This list includes an enhanced user experience, improved Parallel programming, and new methods for debugging your code, new language additions, improved Intellisense, web development, UML modeling, support for Oracle databases, multi monitor support and so on. It seems that Microsoft has tried really hard to impress us. Let us see if the company managed to pull it off.
Next: The Design Changes >>
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