My download is underway right now. And while I wait for two gig of beta good stuff to reach my hard drive, I thought I'd share some of the announcements from Microsoft around Visual Studio 2010.

• The launch will be March 22nd, 2010. I will have more details on that over the next few months.
• The SKUs are being adjusted and simplified. I never met anyone who used just the Developer Edition, Architect Edition, Tester Edition or Database Edition of Visual Studio Team Systems. We all used Team Suite. So now we'll all use the Ultimate Edition. It has even more stuff than the old Team Suite did. People who don't want the source control and work item tracking and modelling and diagramming and schema/data management and all the other great things in Ultimate will get Professional. Some of them will get Premium, which sits in between the other two. Plus all the free Express SKUs will continue to get you what you need to just build an app right away without spending any money at all. (Already a subscriber? You'll get more without paying more, which is hard to argue with.)
  
• MSDN has a whole new look (way more blue, lots of links to fresh blogs and announcements) and some cool new benefits like free Azure hours. If you're paid to make software, you should have an MSDN subscription. If you can't afford it and your company is new, take a look at BizSpark which makes it free. If you're not new or your company doesn't make software, look at the partner program. But for everyone else, this is what you need.

If you totally haven't been paying attention and have no idea what the excitement is about, start with this What's New document and these highlights (featuring screenshots and plenty of links).

And finally, after many years of ,
get ready to start loving and

Kate