In mid October, Microsoft release Beta 2 of its next version of Visual Studio. (Go visit the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 page on MSDN to download.) Upon that news I started thinking back the first beta Visual Studio.Net. that I saw back in 2000. It was the PDC version, life was so simple then the only types of web apps were asp.net and asmx web services. For client applications there was only WinForms. It those days it was easy to master all of these technologies. With this latest release we now have for web applications, in addition to the original ASP.NET Web Forms and ASMX web services, WCF web services, Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data. For client application we also have WPF. For data access we original had ADO.Net but now in addition to that we LINQ and ADO.NET Entity Framework. And there are still other things like ADO.NET Data services. So what I am saying it is hard to be an expert at all of these technologies. So you have to pick which one to be an expert in but you still need to have an idea of the possibilities of the whole suite of tools.
With VS2010 of the technologies to investigate are ASP.Net 4.0, ASP.Net Ajax 4.0, C# 4.0, VB 10, WCF 4.0, WF 4.0, F#, ASP.NET MVC 2.0, ADO.NET, PLINQ , Azure just to name a few. I would recommend downloading the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit to get started on becoming familiar with the new features. I am planning to start looking at ASP.NET 4.0, ASP.NET Ajax 4.0, Silverlight, ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0 and .Net RIA services. Keeping my focus on building RIA web applications.
Another announcement with Beta 2 was the new product lineup (>>Read the press release). As a MSDN subscriber I found this very exciting. Prior to Visual Studio 2005, I had a Universal Subscription with the advent of that release it was changed to 5 different versions of MSDN Premium (Team Suite, Development Edition, Architecture Edition, Test Edition, Database Edition). The Team Suite edition which had everything (like the old Universal) was cost prohibited for an independent consultant like myself. Since I am a developer I have no interest in the Test Edition, therefore I settled on the Developer edition. Because I also have an interest in Architecture and I do a lot of database work I was interested in those editions also. Last year they combine the Developer and the Database Edition which was great news for me because I was able to start using those features. The only saving grace for the Architecture editions it had nothing I was interested in. I know that was going to change with VS2010, from the pre-betas I had seen I knew there was going to be things in it that I had great interest in (UML support). Therefore found the new product lineup to be great news I am planning to get Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN, because it will have everything I need.
The last byte of news that I was delighted about with VS2010 was TFS basic. For the small projects that I work on this would great as my source code repository, which I am finding I need more and more each day.
As you can see all and all I am very excite about VS2010 beta 2 and I just can’t wait until March for the full release. With the golive license for beta 2 I will probably have something in production before then. Keep checking my blog