Microsoft Gathering Feedback on Future Versions of Visual Studio

Microsoft is offering developers the chance to influence future versions of Visual Studio by providing feedback directly to the company.

There are already a few hundred ideas shared by devs on the Visual Studio UserVoice website that the Redmond company has set up to harvest input from those leveraging its development platform.

Users can not only share their own thoughts on the evolution of Visual Studio, but also vote on each other’s contributions in order to indicate what features they’d like most to see in the successor of VS 2010.

“Welcome to the Visual Studio UserVoice site. Let us know what you would like to see in future versions of the Visual Studio suite of products. This site is for suggestions and ideas. If you need to file a bug, visit the Visual Studio Connect site: http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio. We look forward to hearing from you!” reads a message posted on the site authored by Doug Turnure from the Visual Studio Team.

Devs have already shared suggestions on a range of Visual Studio aspects, including C++, C#, Clod, debugging capabilities, .NET, F#, JavaScript, Team Foundation Server, Visual Basic, etc.

Developers visiting the website can quickly browse through the hot idea, but also see the top suggestions, new pieces of feedback, as well as examples of user input that have already been accepted by the software giant for integration into Visual Studio vNext.

The Redmond company is already hard at work building the successor of Visual Studio 2010, although it’s not sharing any details with the public at this point in time.

Just as Visual Studio 2010 was intimately connected with Windows 7, I expect Visual Studio vNext to be tailored to Windows 8, the next generation of the Windows client.

In this context, there’s a real chance that developers will find out much more about the next iteration of Visual Studio at the Windows 8-centric BUILD event next month.