Microsoft Delays Visual Studio 2010 For More Testing

Microsoft has decided to push back the launch of Visual Studio 2010 in order to deliver another interim release of the technology.

The software giant released Beta 2 of its flagship developer tools suite in October, along with the second beta of the .NET Framework 4. And the company said then that it was on track to deliver final versions of both technologies by 22 March, 2010.

However, based on feedback Microsoft has received from beta users of the tool set —particularly regarding performance —the company has decided to address these concerns by providing an interim release some time in February.

In a blog post about Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 moves, S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, said:

“At the same time, you have also given us feedback around performance issues, specifically in a few key scenarios including virtual memory usage. As you may have seen, we significantly improved performance between Beta 1 and Beta 2. Based on what we’ve heard, we clearly needed to do more work. Over the last couple of months, our engineering team has been doing a push to improve performance. We have made significant progress in this space since Beta 2.

With these improvements in the product, we do want to make sure that they truly address the performance issues while continuing to maintain a high quality bar. As a result, we are going to extend the beta period by adding another interim checkpoint release, a Release Candidate with a broad “go live” license, which will be publicly available in the February 2010 timeframe.”

Somasegar added that the reason for the interim release will be to garner additional feedback from users about the adjustments and tweaks made to the code base. As such, “the team will need some time to react to that feedback before creating the final release build,” Somasegar said. “We are therefore moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 back a few weeks.”

That would put the release of Visual Studio 2010 at some point in April at the earliest.

Microsoft on 19 October announced that beta 2 of both Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 were available to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers and that the technology would be generally available to the world at large on 21 October.

In addition to availability of the new beta versions, Microsoft announced a simplified product lineup and pricing options for Visual Studio 2010 as well as new benefits for MSDN subscribers, including what the company is calling the Ultimate Offer, available to all active MSDN Premium subscribers at the official product launch on 22 March, 2010.