14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available for download the General Distribution Release for Visual Studio Lab Management for Visual Studio 2010.
However, not all developers will be able to access the offering. In fact, Microsoft requires devs to use specific releases of the latest iteration of its development platform, and to also have MSDN subscriptions.
Fact is that the Redmond company is delivering Lab Management functionality only to customers running Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Test Professional 2010 with MSDN.
The Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management Deployment Guide from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads will help with the deployment of Lab Management.
“Lab Management enables automation and optimization of the build-deploy-test process, while maintaining visibility into the process, using Hyper-V virtualization technologies,” revealed S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division.
“Lab Management stores, manages, and lets you deploy to known configurations and test environments using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
“Test Manager 2010 allows team members to create, start, stop, and view environments so testers and developers can collaborate without interrupting lab operations,” Somasegar added.
Visual Studio Lab Management for Visual Studio 2010 is designed to help teams of developers work better together, by streamlining the administration of machines, down to functionality such as setting up, tearing down and restoring snapshots.
In the end, the resource is about increasing the efficiency of the development process in a variety of scenarios, whether they include the availability of daily builds or the management of virtual machines.
“Getting an environment configured correctly just to reproduce a bug can take significant time and effort,” Somasegar noted.
“Lab Management allows testers to provide a link to a virtual machine snapshot directly in a bug report so developers can see exactly what testers see. Developers can spend more time debugging and less time installing, configuring, and deploying,” he explained.
Customers interested in the resource but without MSDN accounts can still test drive the technology.
Microsoft is offering VHD Test Drive - Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management as a free download via this link.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.