Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 still planned for the end of the year
You may have seen a lot of messages about the launch date
for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server
2008. According to
this announcement, Microsoft has planned a grouped launch event in
Los Angeles for February 27, 2008.
This does not mean
that all the products will be released at that same
date. Some may be released after the event, others may be
released before.
It seems that the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 is still planned
for the end of the year. Doug Seven, Senior Product Manager
for Visual Studio Team System,
writes on his blog:
"While the launch events are scheduled to kick off on
February 27, 2008,
Visual Studio 2008 will be released before the end of
the year."
Scott Guthrie confirms this on a comment to
this blog post:
"Our hope is to release the product earlier than that -
in which case it will be available for MSDN subscribers to
download as well as for people to buy prior to the launch
events. We haven't announced a target date for this yet -
but I suspect it will be several weeks or a few months
before the launch event."
Regarding VS 2008 Beta 2, Scott writes in another
comment to
the same blog post
that the plan is to make it available for download
in the next three weeks
with a go-live license. This means that we are only
three weeks away from being able to use .NET 3.5 in
production!