Microsoft Offers Developers a Deal on Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 will debut in the spring, and Microsoft is making a deal with developers who are, or are interested in becoming, MSDN Premium subscribers. Learn more about the Ultimate Offer today.

By Internet.com Staff

December 22, 2009

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Vendor: Microsoft Corporation (www.microsoft.com)

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MSDN Ultimate Offer: Save Money and Get Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 will debut in the spring, and Microsoft is making a deal with developers who are, or are interested in becoming, MSDN Premium subscribers.

The Ultimate Offer for Visual Studio 2010 will not only ensure that developers get their hands on the latest integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft, Visual Studio 2008, but it will also upgrade those developers to an even higher version of Visual Studio 2010 when it ships.

The key to the deal is having an MSDN Premium Subscription when Visual Studio 2010 launches in March.

Upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 with the Ultimate Offer
To help you transition to Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is introducing the Ultimate Offer for Visual Studio 2010. The Ultimate Offer is available to customers who have purchased one of the following products on or before March 22, 2010:

Visual Studio Professional 2008 with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition with MSDN Premium

Get the details today!

If you currently have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Professional without an MSDN subscription, you can get an MSDN Premium subscription at a reduced price and save up to $500. Then, when Visual Studio 2010 with MSDN ships, you can convert to a more advanced edition that offers a wealth of additional features. Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Professional users will be upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 Premium.

If you don't already have Visual Studio 2008, you can buy Visual Studio 2008 Professional with MSDN Premium, and get your subscription converted to Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN when Visual Studio 2010 ships (a retail savings of nearly $3,000.00).

Similarly, if you buy one of the Visual Studio 2008 Team System editions with MSDN Premium, you will get your subscription converted to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN when Visual Studio 2010 ships (a retail savings of more than $5,000.00)

Together, Visual Studio 2010 and an MSDN Premium Subscription will provide developers access to all of the tools and resources they need to create and deploy applications for a number of platforms, including the Web, Windows, SharePoint, and the cloud.

MSDN Subscription Benefits
In addition to Visual Studio, MSDN Premium subscribers also receive rights to designer tools like Expression Web and Expression Blend, software and driver development kits (SDKs/DDKs), and other components of the Microsoft Developer platform. Not to mention access to nearly all past and present Microsoft operating systems and servers. An MSDN subscription also provides access to many pre-release versions of future Microsoft products and technologies and typically has the final versions before they start shipping in other channels.

MSDN subscribers have access to a number of support features. Every MSDN Subscription includes professional-grade, developer-specific technical support incidents. With 24/7 Business-Critical service level, support incidents may be called upon for break-fix situations encountered in a non-production environment. Subscribers that want to turn to the MSDN community for support but still can't find the answers to their toughest have the exclusive guarantee of their question being answered. If not effectively answered by the community, posts from MSDN subscribers will be picked up by Microsoft engineers within two business days. Subscribers also have access to the MSDN Online Concierge, a chat-based service that provides subscribers with an exclusive guide to the online world of MSDN.

The monthly MSDN Magazine is another benefit to subscribers. It contains compelling editorial and articles on development, written by some of Microsoft's top developers, and is free to MSDN subscribers in North America. The MSDN Flash newsletter arrives by e-mail every other week with news and information personalized to subscribers' interests and areas of focus.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will include a number of improvements when it ships in the spring. Let's take a look at a sample of the new features.

The Visual Studio IDE has been redesigned for improved readability, and it's less cluttered thanks to the removal of unnecessary lines and gradients. Document windows such as the Code Editor and Design view window will be able to float outside the IDE window in Visual Studio 2010. Developers can drag the Code Editor out of the IDE, for example, so that they can view it and the Design view window side by side, and even across multiple monitors.

The Code Editor itself makes code easier to read. Users can zoom in on text by pressing CTRL and scrolling with the mouse wheel. The new Navigate To feature provides search-as-you-type support for files, types, and members and allows users to take advantage of Camel casing and underscores to abbreviate your search text.

For developers building Web applications, the Web Deployment Tool, (MSDeploy) can package Web apps for deployment to an IIS Web server. A Web package is a .zip file or a folder structure that includes everything a Web server needs to host the application. It contains the content, IIS settings, database scripts, components, registry settings, and certificates. The Web Deployment Tool has been integrated into Visual Studio and enables developers to create Web packages with one click.

Visual Studio 2010 also offers improved support for Silverlight. In Visual Studio 2008, the designer support for Silverlight projects was limited to a read-only Preview window. In Visual Studio 2010, the designer support is the same for Silverlight as it is for WPF projects. For example, in Silverlight projects users can now select and position items with the mouse on the designer surface.

Visual Studio 2010 offers improvements for parallel programming as well. Developers can now write programs that distribute work across multiple processors without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. Visual Studio 2010 includes parallel computing libraries for both the C runtime library (CRT) and the .NET Framework.

SharePoint development is also significantly improved in Visual Studio 2010. Developers can create, edit, debug, package, and deploy, and activate SharePoint projects from within Visual Studio.

Developers interested in building cloud applications with Visual Studio 2010 can easily install and enable Windows Azure Tools to build scalable Web applications and services on Windows Azure.

Take Advantage of the Ultimate Offer
The Ultimate Offer is the easiest way for developers to take advantage of all that MSDN and Visual Studio 2010 have to offer, and it offers significant cost savings in the process.

Make sure you have an MSDN Premium subscription when Visual Studio 2010 ships to get your upgrade. In the meantime, download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 to begin experiencing the next-generation of development tools from Microsoft.