At almost a year after the release to manufacturing of Visual Studio 2008 (in November 2007), and the official launch of the product (in February 2008), Microsoft has made public plans for the next iteration of its integrated development platform. In this context, the Redmond giant has announced that the successor of Visual Studio 2008 will be Visual Studio 2010. Nevertheless, the company has failed to disclose an availability deadline for Visual Studio 2010, but based on the label, the suite is bound to hit either by the end of 2009 or at the start of 2010.

 

According to Microsoft, the next version of its developer tools and platform will be focused on “five areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).”

 

As such, Microsoft has already offered a preview of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) in relation to application life-cycle management. But, beyond Rosario, the company did not offer a taste of the rest of focus areas, delivering just the promise that additional information would be made available as the product evolves through the development process.

 

The Redmond company has indicated that the evolution from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 will offer new capabilities and features, including modeling tools, a fresh testing infrastructure and collaborative functionality.

 

“The application life cycle is an integral part of today’s business. Regardless of core competencies, all organizations are driven by software that is created and customized to deliver a competitive advantage,” revealed Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke, according to Microsoft. “Enterprises that invest in an ALM solution can decrease their total cost of ownership of applications in their IT portfolio, and bring about a global approach that is an integrated and expansive system consisting of people, processes and technology.”