Blink and You've Missed It - Visual Studio Decennial

Visual Studio is not one of the Microsoft products into the spotlight. In fact, with the recent releases, if Windows Vista and Office 2007 combined with the fact that this is not a general consumer product, Visual Studio would have more of a background position. But this is not to say that we shouldn't celebrate its 10-year anniversary. At the beginning of March, Microsoft made available Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, and the product moves forward to Orcas and to Rosario, but it is also notable the fact that it has been here for 10 years.

Not many people - probably with the exception of a few dedicated developers - remember the milestones of Visual Studio: Visual Tool Suite, Visual Studio 97, Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio.NET and Visual Studio 2005. Although the news about Visual Studio's decennial broke yesterday, the actual date is March 19.

"Ten years ago this month, the Internet start-up company I was at (IFusion) went belly-up. From there, I landed in my first role as a professional Visual Basic developer. Meanwhile, Microsoft released the first version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 97. I was largely unaware of it at the time as the Visual Basic project I joined was written in Visual Basic 3. My job was to move it to Visual Basic 4. My next set of projects were all in ASP, Visual Basic 5, or Visual Basic 6, which wasn't really incorporated into Visual Studio yet. In fact, I never actually used Visual Studio as a product per se prior to arriving at Microsoft," revealed Microsoft Content Architect Rob Caron.

It is the opinion of a vast majority of the developers involved with Visual Studio that the software industry has benefited from the tool. Some of them do not even want to imagine what it was like to build software without Visual Studio.

"We have created a new era in software development with .NET. The productivity provided by the .NET framework has allowed applications to be created much quicker and has given developers the ability to focus on their business logic, not on the basic pieces that they want in every application," commented S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.