I am not the biggest fan of Mondays but today is different. Today is a good day. Today we announced the availability of Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and revealed the official launch date:

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on March 22nd 2010

We have also tinkered with the packaging/licensing (to make things easier for you). We announced new packaging, licensing and pricing of Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN. The best bit (IMHO) is:

We include Go Live rights to allow you to evaluate in production environments.

The three main versions will be:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN – for team development
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN - for developers building high quality, scalable apps
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN – for basic development

For MSDN subscribers we also announced the following benefits:

• Team Foundation Server 2010 - All 3 versions of Visual Studio 2010 listed above will include Team Foundation Server.
• Windows Azure – Free usage hours of our cloud services platform including Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET services once the products become commercially available.
• eLearning – complimentary eLearning up to 40 hours per year per subscriber.

Visit the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta site to download the Beta, submit feedback, go to forums, and find more information about the Beta.

I’m off to kick off a download. Have fun!

P.S. If you are not an MSDN subscriber, then the bits should be available on October 21st including the Express versions of Visual Studio 2010.