Visual Studio 2010 RTM

Microsoft celebrated the release of Visual Studio 2010 by holding five major launch events in Beijing, China; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Bangalore, India; London, UK; and Las Vegas, USA; in concert with a total of an additional 150 local events worldwide. As of April 12, 2010, Visual Studio 2010 is already available for purchase, with MSDN subscribers and customers with access to Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) being able to download the full releases. At the same time, Microsoft has made available trial editions of Visual Studio 2010 RTM, for developers that need to test-drive the release before they purchase it.

“There aren’t a lot of surprises in terms of what Visual Studio 2010 does. It does what you asked us to do, and most of you have been working with it in the past month and even longer because we’ve had it in test in our CTP test programs for quite some time. But it’s available now. It’s available for purchase, it’s available as a part of MSDN, and it’s now production-ready and ready for these new solutions to be built. So, it is, indeed, a day and a week to celebrate, and it does open up all of this opportunity for the new solutions,” Bob Muglia, president, Server and Tools Business, revealed.

There are no less than four Visual Studio versions available from the Redmond company, namely the Professional, Premium, Ultimate and Test Professional SKUs. You will be able to find the downloads via the links below. This means that customers without an MSDN subscription can still grab Visual Studio 2010 and test it extensively, to get a feel of the evolution of Microsoft’s development platform.

“This is a release of Visual Studio that covers an awful lot of ground.(…) But we’ve made a very large investment in improving the developer experience with Visual Studio 2010 and we think that will very directly translate into making developers much more effective, much more able to quickly write the code that they need to write,” Muglia added.

Of course, in concert with Visual Studio 2010 RTM, Microsoft is also offering the bits for .NET Framework 4, which can also be downloaded from the company. Silverlight 4 RTM will be offered for download by the end of this week.

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.