Microsoft is offering a $250 reduction on the estimated retail price of Visual Studio 2010, but only for developers that move fast. The Redmond company has kicked-off pre-orders of the Professionals SKU for the next generation of its development platform, which is now just a month away from General Availability. According to the software giant, Visual Studio 2010 GA continues to be right on track for April 12, 2010. A release to manufacturing date has yet to be announced, but will happen within the next 30 days.

Developers that are planning to make the jump to Visual Studio 2010 can already pre-order a copy of the Professional edition from either the Microsoft Store or Amazon.com. Both ecommerce websites have the product listed at $549, which, according to the software giant, represents a price cut of $250. However, customers need to already own an older version of Visual Studio, as only the Upgrade flavor of Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for pre-ordering.

“Eligible for upgrade with any previous version of Visual Studio or any other developer tool. Get the latest version of Visual Studio 2010 Professional. Visual Studio 2010 is the essential tool for individuals performing basic development tasks, including creating applications for SharePoint and the Cloud. Visual Studio 2010 Professional includes a 12-month MSDN Essentials subscription. MSDN Essentials gives you access to core Microsoft platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Datacenter R2,” Microsoft stated.

But in this specific case, Microsoft has a very interesting way of taking into consideration “any previous version of Visual Studio” to make customers eligible for the upgrade. Essentially, customers with a trial version of Visual Studio can also take advantage of the special offer. “If you're using a trial version of Visual Studio Professional and you buy the Visual Studio 2010 Professional Upgrade, you can use the product key you get on the receipt page to convert your trial version to a full version,” the company informs.

Customers that pre-order Visual Studio 2010 Professional Upgrade will be able to download the RTM bits of the next versions of the development platform on April 12, 2010.

.NET Framework 4 Beta 2 is available for download here.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 2 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 are available for download via this link.