Microsoft Outlines Vision for Application Development...

 

Microsoft will lay out plans for its upcoming "Whidbey" and "Orcas" versions of Visual Studio on July 29 at FTP's VSLive! New York conference. Attendees will get a sneak preview of the next release of Visual Studio, hear about "new opportunities for partners, plus much more," according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

Prashant Sridharan, Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio .NET at Microsoft, was quoted by eWeek as saying that "Whidbey will be a very significant product for developers ... It will be the most customer-driven product our developer division has ever shipped." Whidbey will include "new features that bring the developer community closer to the overall development experience, including community search capabilities and other features," he said. "Web design capabilities are anticipated that draw on the Microsoft Web Matrix Web development tool, which achieved more than 500,000 downloads." Senior Vice President Eric Rudder showed Whidbey briefly in his keynote at VSLive! San Francisco in February.

Orcas is the code name for the version following Whidbey. The Orcas release is expected in 2005, according to Vice President Paul Flessner's keynote speech at the Microsoft Tech•Ed conference in Dallas earlier this month.

Source: Visual Studio Magazine