UPDATED: 02/27/09: Microsoft on Tuesday showed off Visual Studio 2010 at the VSLive conference in San Francisco. The general manager of the product also issued an invitation to open source developers asking them to build plug-ins for the tool, reports The Register. However obstacles galore must be hurdled before the open source community would accept.
The look and feel of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft’s next integrated development environment (IDE), will be based on Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation and .Net Framework 4.0 technologies, reports Infoworld. This will give it rich text display, multiple Windows support and better rendering of geometry, the story says.
Microsoft has slowly been dribbling out tidbits of information about the new version for months. For instance, in October, it promised that this version would support jQuery. But Redmond has not revealed a date for the beta, nor a target date for the final release. Some speculators say that, despite the 2010 name, the product could actually be available in late 2009, if Microsoft maintains its previous, two-year release cycles for Visual Studio.
In any case, Microsoft is trying to show some love to open source developers with this product — or rather to get OS coders to love Microsoft. The tool is supposed to support multiple open source plug-ins, albeit most of them developed by Microsoft or created in cahoots with Redmond. The shining outside-the-box example is the popular, open source JavaScript library jQuery. According to the demonstration, jQuery support will be integrated with the tool’s IntelliSense feature.
Visual Studio general manager Jason Zander told The Register that he hopes open source developers will code plug-ins for Visual Basic 2010. However, a few things remain unclear about that such as the license Microsoft would use to share its proprietary code so that folks can actually build their plug-ins and what license would cover the open source add-ons themselves.
Another issue that won’t exactly lure open source lovers is that Visual Basic 2010 does not yet naively support the open source favorite database MySQL, according to The Register article. It will include a new plug-in to Oracle and, like earlier versions, continue to support Microsoft’s SQL Server and IBM’s DB2. MySQL is supported by downloading a .Net plug in, according to a reader.
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