Microsoft offers second beta for Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft will offer the second beta of its upcoming Visual Studio 2010 software development platform and the accompanying .Net Framework 4 programming platform. The Visual Studio platform is being reduced from nine different packaging options to just three primary options.

“The feedback that we’ve heard from our customers was [nine options] was too complicated,” said Mendlen. “There were too many packages to choose from.” The three primary packages, featuring MSDN subscriptions, include:

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN, featuring the full suite of tools including ALM products. Testing and architecture tools also are featured. It carries a price tag of $11,924 for a new customer and $3,841 for a current customer renewing with Microsoft.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN, featuring the Visual Studio toolset but lacking some architecture capabilities of the Ultimate edition. Some of Microsoft’s ALM suite is included. Premium costs $5,469 for new users and $2,299 for customers seeking renewals.

Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN, for basic development tasks. It includes the core version of Visual Studio. It costs $1,199 for a new user and $799 for a renewal.”

Weekly Wrap-up. While there's a lot of noise about the UI challenge between Windows 7 vs Mac OS X some claim that Windows 7 needs a universal updater.

There is a lot of speculations around new OS's from Microsoft and Apple with the intentions to identify who invented what and what ideas has been stolen. The interest significantly grow after recent story "Apple versus Microsoft" published at InforWorld. The article marked the top 20 ideas that both houses have stolen from each other during years and provides slideshows on the stolen features.

Although, the emphasis has been given mostly on two new Windows 7's features - the task bar and Aero Peek it doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft leads in the list of stolen ideas. For example, the co-called Mac Finders's sidebar, according to the article has been taken from Navigation pane in Windows XP. The conclusion is that the borrowing process has been going for a long time and will continue to go on. A long list of major features eventually became a part of the computing landscape and it would be useless to try to find the roots.

Much more important for both Apple and Microsoft nowadays and in the future is to keep innovation on the place, as users become mature and selective, and it might be a problem even for such a popular OS as a Windows, especially when new the rival Google's Chrome comes to the market.

Although, Google many times has been blamed for stealing ideas from Apple yet it has its unique approach for user-friendliness, which might play as a main trigger for further innovation.

Apart from large-scale OS's wars let's turn to more realistic issues. Last month Apple was widely criticized for pushing the iPhone configuration utility to Windows users who have the Apple updater installed as the software was utterly useless to the majority of computer users, most of whom don't even own iPhones. That occasion proves that there is no need to have individual updater applications for Windows, Java, Apple and others as the universal updater is exactly the solution that can manage all updates for all software. As a result Mac's, Wins and other users can configure their updates, permit or restrict some particular updates and decide when the updates are allowed to occur.

An universal updater would obligate software developers dealing with it to comply with policies governing how applications is to be used. It would would remove the frustration of tediously removing updaters from each applications as well as return some control back to the user, and keep all relevant applications up to date.

According to Michael Scalisi an IT manager, an universal updater can provide a great benefits to users making Windows more flexible platform.

Microsoft creates tools for migration from LINQ to SQL to ADO.NET Entity Framework.

It is widely known that in the last release of the Microsoft.NET Framework there are two built-in object-relational mapping (ORM) solutions. One is LINQ to SQL and another ADO.NET Entity Framework. While the first one was introduced earlier in the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, an ADO.NET Entity Framework appeared later on in the .NET 3.5 SP1 with support in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Although ADO.NET Entity Framework is younger and provides more simplistic functionality than LINQ to SQL it has gained recognition and being developed very dynamically by Microsoft. Its new version will be improved and enhanced with new features in the upcoming release of the .NET framework..

Moreover, Microsoft has already released the first version of Visual Studio 2010 templates for LINQ to SQL (.dbml) metadata migration to ADO.NET Entity Framework (.edmx) models which proves their strategical intentions to abandon LINQ to SQL in favour of ADO.NET Entity Framework.

That said, it does not necessarily mean that one day all software built using LINQ to SQL will stop working, but it could cause serious obstacles for the migration of existing applications to the following versions of the .NET Framework. From this perspective ADO.NET Entity Framework is undoubtedly more attractive for cost-effective and low-risk migration solutions.


The article has been prepared by Denis Nikolayenko. The original version of this article on Russian can be found here