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New betas of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft also announced a simplification of Visual Studio licensing, starting with the 2010 release.

Visual Studio 2008 is offered in two Professional editions (with either an MSDN Professional or Premium subscription), and a set of Visual Studio Team System 2008 role editions (that variously support functions including architect, developer and tester; and include MSDN Premium membership).

The replacements will be Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN.

New benefits for MSDN members were part of the announcement: unlimited access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 (when released), up to 40 hours of e-learning (per subscriber per year), and - for premium subscribers - development access to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud services platform.

"Developers face demanding, complex and fast-paced environments today and this new wave of tools and technologies will help simplify the development process from design to deployment.

"Microsoft is enabling developers to use their existing skills and knowledge to build better software, faster," said Joerg Lindner, Microsoft Australia's product manager, developer tools.

"Now is the time to test drive the new functionality and features in these releases, which address everything from Windows 7 and SharePoint support to collaboration and life-cycle management," he added.