With a new OS, the cloud and smartphones, Microsoft is making some big changes to its flagship developer toolkit.
Microsoft has disclosed the final product lineup and specifications for the next release of Visual Studio, which will be used for developing apps for everything from Windows 8 to Windows Phone and Azure.
The lineup consists of Visual Studio 11 Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Test and Team Foundation Server and Express, plus a new product, Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone.
Visual Studio 11 Express products are designed to support the development, testing and debugging of applications for Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Azure and for the Web. Express products support multiple languages, specific to each platform.
Microsoft said it will release Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone with the next release of Windows Phone, which should be out later this year. Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo, is said to be a significant update to the smartphone OS while retaining backward compatibility with existing apps.
Microsoft will also release an updated Visual Studio for Windows Azure and developers can continue building apps for both Phone and Azure with the existing versions of Visual Studio, and the code can be migrated to the new tool and platforms.
Finally, Microsoft will make LightSwitch a part of the Visual Studio 11 core product family. LightSwitch was released out of band with VS and is designed to accelerate development of apps that connect to a data source, like a database.
Microsoft says that Visual Studio 11 hardware requirements will be the same as Visual Studio 2010, but it will only run on Windows 7 and 8. VS 2010 worked on XP and Vista. However, there will be a multi-targeting option for apps that need to run on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.
Further details are available on the Visual Studio site.
