It seems like The Register jumped the gun a bit announcing the official launch date for Visual Studio 2010, however, Doug Seven, Senior Product Manager for VSTS from Microsoft confirmed that Visual Studio 2010 will be launched on 22 March 2010. However, with the actual release on schedule, Microsoft has officially announced quite a few existing changes to the Visual Studio 2010 line up, least popular of which is the new SKU and the dropping of the Team System name.

For those that do not want to wait, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has been made available to MSDN subscribers and is available from the download site here. Brian Keller has also provided detailed instructions on how this can be done here. Beta 2 comes with a Go Live license, which means you can use it for day to day production ready development.

To summarise the following changes have been announced:

• Team System name dropped and replaced with Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate.
• Complete new SKU and version breakdown, including a new MSDN subscription model.
• Team Foundation Server Basic edition available to install on Windows Vista and 7 Clients
• Brand new MSDN look & feel.
• Brand new Visual Studio Logo.

Over the next few days I will be looking at some of these changes in a bit more detail, hopefully clearing up confusion and also introducing some of the new exciting offers from Microsoft.

On a personal note I have to comment based on the reaction I saw from the MVP’s to the dropping of the Team System name, which has been quite strong during the last few days. The MVP’s are most likely Microsoft biggest critics at the moment, and the passion and drive they show to get a point across, to the people at Microsoft that make the decision, is amazing and awesome to see. Do not underestimate the Team System MVP’s.