Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 becomes available for the MSDN subscribers on Monday, May 18.
The software business lends itself to startups because every new generation of platform technology spawns new innovations that leapfrog mature solutions. The trouble with those new platforms though is that by the time they get mature enough to make your new product stable, they are already out of date themselves.
VS2010 appears to be an exception to that rule, offering just enough innovation to get you excited about creating new stuff while adding stability to make up for flakiness in previous releases.
At yesterday’s TempWorks picnic lunch (yes, the temperature got above 70 in Minneapolis), I got a chance to talk to several of our developers about what VS2010 meant to us.
One commented that it offered a designer for workflow processes.
“Wait, didn’t VS2005 do that?” I asked.
It was supposed to, he said. It never worked very well, and he always resorted to hand-coding the xml behind workflow.
Another commented that the debugger in VS2010 worked faster, that it took advantage of new hardware capabilities like dual core. So instead of the stodgy wait that you used to get while debugging, the feel is much smoother. He also said the long intellisense waits you got with VS2005 have been eliminated.
It seems every day I come across a staffing company that wants to get into the software business. Last month, a staffing company in Kansas City called me to see if I wanted to buy out their sister staffing software company.
“We’ve invested $4 million in this over the last three years, but we’ll take a million and a half.”
Oh really, I ask, wondering how an eight-office staffing company came up with $4 million for software.
“What platform are you on?” I ask.
He muttered something about .Net 2.0. Might as well have said DOS.
