It came to my attention today that some customers are finding it hard to find the released version of Visual Studio that supports the just-released .NET Framework 3.0. Therefore, I figured it might be useful to walk through the various versions available today in chronological order and provide links to the download pages that I helped create and publish.
1) Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey):
Dev Tools (available for download):
· Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition 90-day Trial
· Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite 180-Day Trial
· Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Trial Edition
· Visual Studio Express Editions
Framework:
· .NET Framework 2.0
2) Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (codenamed “Fidalgo) : These tools are provided as an early preview of technology being considered for the Orcas release of Visual Studio. These tools are not supported by Microsoft but provided as is to enable early adoption of the .NET Framework 3.0 platform. Users will be expected to upgrade to the Visual Studio Orcas release when that becomes commercially available.
· Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0, November 2006 CTP
· .NET Framework 3.0 Bootstrapper
3) Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas”:
· September 2006 CTP: first VPC image release of our September CTP. Watch for more posts on how we created it and what the feedback has been so far.
· October 2006 CTP: differencing disk released with more features that were checked in since the September release.
Maybe this clarifies things a little and folks can find the Visual Studio bits that they are looking to continue development.