Microsoft Sweetens Visual Studio 2010 With Azure Deal
Microsoft is getting ready to roll out Visual Studio 2010, the latest version of their pedigreed software development environment on April 12. If you’re a developer upgrading from an older version of Visual Studio, Microsoft has some good news for you. And if you’re looking into buying the professional edition at retail, there’s even better news — it’ll include 20 hours of Windows Azure. Interested?
The good news comes from a blog post by Microsoft developer division head S. Somasegar.
“The Standard Offer enables customers who purchased Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard Edition to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 at the previous Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition $299 retail price,” he writes. That offer will be available from April 12 – October 12.
More interestingly is his announcement of MSDN Essentials, a year-long trial subscription to the Microsoft Developers Network that will be included with Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition.
The Essentials subscription gets members access to Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and SQL Server 2008 Datacenter R2 – and twenty free hours of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform – to deploy and test applications.
The freebies are nice, but developers will need a little more to make the upgrade worth it. New in Visual Studio 2010, according to Segar’s blog post, is “the ability to optimize your development environment with multi-monitor support, and the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework with one tool.”
It’s a nice little package for one of Microsoft’s most prolific products – and anything that gets Azure into the hands of their developer partners can only be a good thing for Microsoft in the long run.
