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Microsoft has announced a set of promotions for developers looking to purchase its Visual Studio 2010 tool set when it ships on April 12.
Dave Mendlen, senior director of developer marketing at Microsoft, told eWEEK that Microsoft has new promotions that benefit retail purchasers of Visual Studio 2010 Standard Edition and Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition.
Microsoft is announcing a Standard Offer promotion to enable current Standard Edition customers to easily and affordably move up to Visual Studio 2010, Mendlen said. 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 retail price of $299. Standard Edition customers can take advantage of this offer April 12-Oct. 12, 2010.
The Standard Offer also features SharePoint, Office, Silverlight, multi-monitor support, a new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) editor, and the ability to extend the Visual Studio 2010 integrated development environment (IDE) with third-party add-ons via Visual Studio Gallery.
“We are extending this offer to Visual Studio Standard customers, which tend to be non-professional or individual developers,” Mendlen said.
In a blog post about the new promotions, S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, said, “Visual Studio 2010 provides significant new benefits, such as the ability to optimize your development environment with multimonitor support, and the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework with one tool. For Standard customers this functionality represents a substantial step up in tooling.”
Meanwhile, for Visual Studio 2010 Professional retail customers, Microsoft announced MSDN Essentials, a one-year trial Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscription that will be included with every retail copy of Visual Studio Professional sold, Mendlen said.
“We think every professional developer should have MSDN, we we’ve added an MSDN subscription in the box with every copy,” Mendlen said.
The price of Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN Essentials is $799 new and $549 for upgrades from previous versions.
Regarding the Visual Studio Professional with MSDN offer, Somasegar said:
““MSDN Essentials subscribers will have access to three of the latest Microsoft platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and SQL Server 2008 Datacenter R2 for development and test use, as well as 20 hours of Windows Azure. Subscribers will also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, Priority Support in MSDN Forums, and will be included in special offers from partners.”“
In addition, Mendlen said that for the first time ever, Microsoft is giving developers the opportunity to pre-order Visual Studio. The Microsoft Store and other select online resellers, such as Amazon.com, will pre-sell Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN Essentials from March 9 through April 11.