Announcing availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4

I am very excited to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 on April 12^th. 

This represents the biggest tools release from Microsoft in many years.

To celebrate this with our customers and partners, we are holding 5 major launch events on April 12^th in Beijing, China; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Bangalore, India; London, UK; Las Vegas, USA; and in over 150 local events around the world.

The new release of Visual Studio 2010 has plenty of compelling new features and updates that will make every developer more productive.

·         Visual Studio 2010 allows users target of the right platform for their application, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint. Office, Windows Azure, and Windows Phone 7 applications using their existing skills.

·         Visual Studio 2010 is a rich, personalized development environment.  We know that software developers spend much of their time in the IDE, and features like the new editor and multi-monitor support make your time in Visual Studio more productive and enjoyable.

·         Teams are able to work more efficiently using Application Lifecycle Management tools.  We’ve done a great deal of work in Visual Studio 2010 to improve testing and debugging tools.  Features like IntelliTrace and easy project management help your team ensure high quality.

I always say that our partners play a key role in the success of our platforms and tools.  With Visual Studio, it is no different.  Between the tools that we deliver in Visual Studio and what our partners build on top of Visual Studio, we have a very comprehensive tools offering for our customers.  I do want to take this opportunity to thank the approximately 50 partners who announced availability of products and solutions built on this latest wave of technologies. I am also very appreciative and thankful of the customers, MVPs, and others who provided us valuable feedback and made Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 such an amazing release.

I am also thrilled to say that Silverlight 4 will be released to the Web later this week. When Silverlight 4 is released, you will be able to download an update for Visual Studio 2010 to support Silverlight 4 development.

I hope you will join us at one of our events, or watch the keynote live.

I look forward to your participation as we strive to reach a million developers on April 12 through our world-wide launch events. To purchase Visual Studio 2010 now, visit here.  If you are an MSDN subscriber, later in the day on April 12th you can download Visual Studio 2010 from MSDN.

Namaste!