14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the signing off of the code for the first Community Technology Preview of the Rosario release of Visual Studio. Moreover, the Redmond company is also getting ready to make available Visual Studio 2008 codenamed Orcas Beta 2 in the coming days, according to Scott Guthrie, General Manager of Microsoft's Developer Division. While VS 2008 Orcas is still in the making, Microsoft is also focusing on building Rosario, the Visual Studio release planned to follow Orcas. "You'll see Beta2 ship later this week - so only a few more days now," Guthrie promised on July 23.
But While Orcas if moving to beta 2 stage, Rosario development is also advancing. "I believe this first CTP will actually be called CTP8 (that's what we call it internally). That's because it's the CTP after the 8th iteration of development. The next CTP will be after iteration 10 and will be in about 3 months. The primary features in this CTP include new tools for the manual tester and work item linking and hierarchy support. Over the next few days, I'll pull together a post with the details on what is in the CTP and lay out a more concrete roadmap for what's now finished in Orcas and what's coming in Rosario," revealed Brian Harry, Microsoft engineer.
If you are a developer looking to build products designed especially for Windows Vista, the Office 2007 System and Windows Server 2008, then Visual Studio 2008 will offer you access to the latest collection of tools from Microsoft. The Redmond company additionally stated that it is aiming at a new approach with the parallel Orcas and Rosario projects.
"Historically, we have managed our development cycles pretty serially. We are trying something new this time. We have been working on Rosario (to some degree or another) since Sept of last year. Progress has been dampened by the fact that most of the team has been working on Orcas or the Database Professional release during that time but none-the-less we've made some great progress. The outcome of this should be a shorter delta between Orcas and Rosario than we've seen between previous releases," Harry added.
The bottom line is that neither Orcas Beta 2 nor the CTP for Rosario are currently up for download. The beta 2 for Orcas will be delivered by the end of this week and the Rosario CTP will become live in the coming couple of weeks.