Available for download from Microsoft

May 13, 2010 11:43 GMT  ·  By

With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 finalized and available to developers, Microsoft is offering a free resource designed to streamline the upgrading process for those using older versions of Visual Studio. “Moving to Visual Studio 2010 e-Book” is offered for free via the Microsoft Download Center, and the official label is rather self-explanatory. The resource will help developers running VS2003, VS2005 or VS2010 make the jump to the latest iteration of Visual Studio. Finalized a month ago, Visual Studio 2010 represents the apex of Microsoft development tools, and is tailored to products such as Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

“The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It's a book that will help professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010,” an excerpt from the download’s description reads.

Although the promise is that the book also references VS2003 to VS2010 upgrades, fact is that Microsoft only provided six chapters in two separate downloads, focused on VS2005 and VS2008, respectively. No word from the company on whether it will add the chapters focused on Visual Studio 2003. The software giant divided each download into three parts, namely Designing the Look and Feel, Business Logic and Data, and Debugging an Application. These are the main aspects discussed in detail in the Visual Studio 2010 upgrade e-book.

“Each part will help developers understand how to use Visual Studio 2010 to create many different types of applications and unlock their creativity independently of the version they are using today. This book will be focusing on Visual Studio, but will also cover many language features that make the move even more interesting,” it is added in the book.

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.