Download Extended Free Trial of Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft is cooking the final stages for the general availability of Visual Studio 2008. The Redmond company's latest iteration of the Visual Studio development suite is tailored on Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System, and will be launched in Los Angeles on February 27th, 2008, as a part of the "Heroes Happen Here" event, together with Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. But ahead of the February release, users can grab a couple of Virtual PC images designed to permit the test-driving of Visual Studio 2008 for an extensive period of time.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server VPC Image are the two trial versions offered by Microsoft. As it is generally the case with the test versions of the company's products, the images are time-bombed and set to expire on April 1st, 2008. Users will need whether Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 in order to be able to run the images.

"Microsoft Visual Studio Team System an integrated Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance to help everyone on the team improve their skills and work together more effectively", Microsoft revealed. "Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server is an integrated collaboration server for Visual Studio Team System. It combines team portal, version control, work item tracking, build management, process guidance, and business intelligence into a unified server. It allows everyone on the team to collaborate more effectively and deliver better quality software."

On November 19th, Visual Studio 2008 was released to manufacturing, along with the .NET Framework 3.5. The RTM version of the development suite, formerly codenamed Orcas, became available for download via MSDN. At this point in time, you can also get your hands on the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server VPC Image.