CNET News: Visual Studio 2010 to launch in March

According to this article from CNET News from October 19th, Visual Studio 2010 will launch in March, 2010.  This sort of follows the current timeline, where the Beta 2 has just been released, and we can probably expect another beta and/or a Release Candidate drop to evaluate before the final release.

Scanning through some of the comments in the CNET post, it seems that many people are debating the usefulness of upgrading their development environment.  I personally don’t understand this.  As of Visual Studio 2008, the ability to target multiple versions of the framework has been there, and the newer tools are miles ahead of their predecessors.  The only distinction that I would make on that is the Business Intelligence tools (which seem to be target more specifically for a given version of Visual Studio and SQL Server) and the legacy C++ tools that have been phased out of Visual Studio over time.

My only question is whether the new environment, which apparently is based upon Window Presentation Foundation (WPF), will be more or less responsive than the current IDE.  More importantly, will it be more stable, especially with respect to add-ons like Team Explorer and the various “extra” project types, like the Database Professional Edition projects. 

Possibly the biggest boon from moving to Visual Studio 2010 will be built-in (although I have yet to use it) Azure support.  I believe that building and deploying applications and services to Azure (an other cloud services environments) will be a massive shift in the next generation of .Net. 

Here’s hoping they get it right!

More later – joel.