Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, .NET 4 Beta 1 for general release Wednesday
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that today, May 18, will be the release date for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, for MSDN subscribers. The general public will get their first shot at both new technologies on Wednesday.
Though last September's preview edition showed the addition of new tools for application architecture modeling -- moving deep into IBM territory there -- as well as for development team management, it was all being shown under the auspices of the old VS 2008 front end. Soon after the preview edition was released, the company revealed that it was scrapping that more traditional front end in favor of a design based on the Windows Presentation Foundation platform.
That design made its way to select testers first, who we've learned did not like one of the new design changes: the use of different pointing triangles to denote collapsed and expanded code section blocks. As Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander blogged last week, the feedback essentially boiled down to, why change a good thing? So the [+] and [-] boxes from VS 2008 have returned in Beta 1.
The new IDE will also give developers their first chance to build .NET services in the cloud, a huge new addition to that platform. In fact, the addition itself is a platform, up to now code-named "Dublin," and will give a way for developers in local .NET code to leverage just as much cloud-based services as they may require, including deploying their entire applications to cloud-based services such as Windows Azure.
Dublin
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The Windows Applications Server extension project is Microsoft's platform for distributing .NET applications in the cloud.
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Microsoft's objective is to leverage its existing investment in the .NET Framework so that businesses can readily deploy applications, using the tools and resources they already own (including Visual Studio 2010), on a cloud computing platform such as Windows Azure.
Dublin architecture asks developers to build "event handlers," borrowing a phraseology from another era of Windows programming, except that these events are generated by Web users, not by the end user of a GUI. These events are then handled through "virtual ports" that capture and interpret the events asynchronously, and then respond. While conceivably Dublin could deploy an existing .NET application to the cloud, you'd lose the point. Truly distributed applications respond to events that have been "published," and to which customers "subscribe" -- a signal which the application can recognize and accept. Using tools such as Workflow Foundation (WF), developers can build .NET code that responds to published events through what's called a service bus in Windows Communication Foundation. (This is the technology which Microsoft engineers predicted in 2004 would have already rendered IIS obsolete by now.) The result is an asynchronously behaving component that can be deployed as a component in a distributed composite application.
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It is classic Microsoft to leverage its strengths in one area to build in another. It absolutely differentiates Microsoft's approach to cloud computing from its competitors in that it enables customers to build their own services to be deployed in the cloud, rather than 1) float an image of Windows Server in the cloud and pretend it's on-site; or 2) try to adapt someone else's cloud-based "out-of-the-cloud" application to suit their own purposes explicitly.