IMHO Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management is a l33t product. At this point in time, there is no word on the pricing but I going through the Visual Studio 2010 Licensing White Paper I don’t think that it will be cheap, furthermore I am also a bit  afraid that in a lot of companies it will be a bit hard to sell because of company politics as it is possible that your company is already using for example VMware vCenter Lab Manager and they might not be willing to just throw that away (yet).

David Baliles, the Enterprise Tools Strategist @ Microsoft posted on his MSDN blog a whole bunch of Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management videos which are worth checking out.

Click here for the videos.

Pieter Gheysens is giving a session on Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 on the 22nd December 2009 @ 18u30.

Read more here.

I uninstalled Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate to install the Visual Studio 2010 Premium SKU. I decided to only uninstall the main component and leave all the other components intact.

The uninstall went flawless but the installation of Visual Studio 2010 Premium showed that there was an error installing the Visual Studio Macro Tools:

[11/27/09,08:04:40] Microsoft Visual Studio Macro Tools: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Setup detection logic indicates that this component is NOT installed, but MSI indicates that it IS already installed.  This is usually caused by an incompatible previous version being installed on the system.  Check in Add Remove Programs and uninstall any previous versions of Microsoft Visual Studio Macro Tools.

This is not something that you would expect because one would assume that the version of the components that make up the Visual Studio suite are similar between the different SKUs. So, just out of curiosity, I uninstalled the Visual Studio Macro Tools that was installed as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate installation:

Next, I ran the installer for the Visual Studio Macro Tools that comes with the Premium SKU. You can find the installer on the installation media (X:\WCU\VSA\VSA_ENV.MSI). The version of the Visual Studio Macro Tools that I have now is exactly the same, so it must be a glitch in the installer:

Microsoft is giving special offers on Visual Studio, Team System and MSDN Subscriptions. You get a 30% discount for a step-up license if you go from Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition to any of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Edition. You also get 30% off if you step-up from one of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Edition to the Team Suite edition.

What you need to know is that if you have a Software Assurance for Visual Studio (like I do) that you only get 30% the first year!

More information

Microsoft published the November preview of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit.

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: C# 4.0, Visual Basic 10, F#, Parallel Computing Platform, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data.

Download here.

The list of Hands-on labs:

• Visual Studio 2010: Office Programmability
• Visual Studio 2010: Test Driven Development
• Parallel Extensions: Building Multicore Applications with .NET
• Introduction To Managed Extensibility Framework
• ASP.NET AJAX
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Intro To Project "Velocity"
• Intro To F#

We had to wait for the 1st Service Pack for Visual Studio 2008 to have support for SQL Server 2008 but the developers among us who are still using Visual Studio 2005 in combination with SQL Server 2008 were left out in the cold. I am glad to see that Microsoft released a CTP version of an update that makes Visual Studio 2005 compatible with SQL Server 2008. It is still not feature complete, you can’t for example create tables in the Table Designer and there are still some known issues and you need Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005.

Download

Here is a preview of how the new shell for Visual Studio 2010 looks like. I like it and maybe they will find a way to incorporate the Ribbon bar as well?

It would be nice if you could change all the colours which will make "dark" themes look more appealing than they do now in the current versions of Visual Studio.

Source

Microsoft unveils the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework in a press release here. Surprisingly Visual Studio will be named Visual Studio 2010 and this will already be the 4.0 version of the .NET Framework. The focus lies on supporting the latest platforms and an improved ALM experience for every role involved in the development process including the CIO.

There are some nice features added to Visual Studio 2010 like UML 2.1, for example it will be possible to generate a Sequence Diagram by right-clicking a method and so on. Another nice addition is a built-in video capturing tool that allows the testers to create a video of a bug they reproduce that can be handed over to the development team. This "video" will also capture the state the application was in which is valuable information for the developers. This feature is internally called by the VSTS team "Tivo for debugging".

Other great news is that Microsoft is adding features from "DataDude" to the VSTS Development Edition which Microsoft refers to as merging the developer and database roles. Very nice to know that as a developer you can even write your stored procs test-driven.

More links:

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel 9!
• Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2010. Developers Respond.

I have seen that the last couple of weeks Microsoft has invested in in-game advertisements for Visual Studio. Here is a screen of a Visual Studio advertisement in Enemy Territory Quake Wars (ETQW):

If you take a look at the context menu entries when you right-click a project in Visual Studio 2008 then you will see that this is getting out of hand, it no longer fits on my screen area: