Dec 30, 2010 10:50 GMT  ·  By

New free resources designed to help developers make the best out of Visual Studio 2010 will be offered starting early next year. Microsoft revealed that a VS 2010 webinar series will kick off as early as January, with opportunities to leverage the resources remaining available until mid-2011.

According to John Bristowe, Senior Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Canada, the webinars will focus not only on Visual Studio 2010, but also Team Foundation Server 2010 as well as on providing guidance to devs on quality assurance for their projects.

In fact, ‘Building Quality Applications with Visual Studio’ is one of the webminars, for which developers can already registers. The following dates are available: January 11 | February 8 | March 8 | April 5 | May 3 | June 7.

“Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing have two key goals: to validate the quality of an application and to improve overall software quality. Visual Studio 2010 helps achieve both of these with robust testing and diagnostics tools.

“It can also strengthen collaboration across your application lifecycle by breaking down silos within teams and delivering key integration capabilities, helping ensure teams are more productive,” Bristowe explained.

Another webinar is titled ‘Software Delivery using Team Foundation Server 2010.’ Registration for this online event is also already opened, with devs needing to decide on one of these dates: January 14 | February 11 | March 11 | April 8 | May 6 | June 10.

“Join us for this session that provides a functional overview and demonstration of some of the key aspects of Team Foundation Server, and also speaks about migration from existing lifecycle tooling, such as Visual SourceSafe.

“This session will introduce the broad spectrum of capabilities that Visual Studio 2010 technologies bring to the Test and QA space, to help you understand how you can test your systems more effectively,” Bristowe added.

The last webinar offered by the Redmond company is ‘Ultimate Development with Visual Studio,’ available on January 13 | February 10 | March 10 | April 7 | May 5 | June 9.

As the tile implies, this event is focused entirely on the high end edition of VS 2010. “Attend to learn how to eliminate 'no repro' with IntelliTrace, understand and re-use existing architectural patterns, help with architectural compliance, and validate scalability and reliability for your solutions,” Bristowe stated.

You will be able to find download links for the free trial versions of the various SKUs of Visual Studio 2010 below.

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.