14 DAY TRIAL // Visual Studio has been evolving at a steady pace for the past 18 months, with enhancements being introduced at an average rate of about one per week, according to Brian Harry, Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation. Harry published a blog post in the VS release cadence, and ended up concluding that value is being added to Visual Studio extremely fast.
Of course, he underlined from the get go that the evolution of Visual Studio is about kicking the developer experience to the next level rather than simply introducing new features.
In this regard, Harry counted all of the releases that contributed to pushing Visual Studio forward in the last year and a half.
We “counted almost everything - Major product, service packs, Power Tools, Feature Packs, SDKs, out of band releases (like Silverlight tooling or phone tooling), etc.,” he said.
“[But] not hotfixes - that would really bloat the number and be misleading. The surprising thing was that there were about 75 releases. That means we've released some VS value about once a week for the past 18 months.”
One issue with this is of course related to whether developers leveraging Visual Studio actually got a chance to leverage the new enhancements or not.
Harry acknowledges that there are VS devs that might not be aware of all the Visual Studio improvements Microsoft is shipping.
“We have some work to do to provide a better delivery channel for the updates that makes it easier for people to learn about them and choose whether or not to install them,” he explained.
“We also need to make sure they aren't disruptive to end users when they install them. We're working on a plan to better leverage the VS Gallery for that in the VS 11 release. We're contemplating a set of enhancements to the VS Gallery that will enable us to publicize more of our updates that way.”
Microsoft is currently working on the successor of Visual Studio 2010, but it’s unclear what will the official label for the developer platform be.
Harry mentions VS 11, Microsoft has yet to confirm a Visual Studio 11 or Visual Studio 2011 brand, or a 2011 release for that matter.
The software giant is of course working on Visual Studio vNext, which will enable developers to build applications tailored to Windows 8. And while the company opened up a tad on Windows 8, it failed to do the same about the next version of Visual Studio.
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.