On March 7, Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2017, the latest and most flexible version of its developer suite. In doing so, the firm will also celebrate Visual Studio’s 20th anniversary.
“Today, Microsoft is kicking off a celebration of 20 years of Visual Studio,” a Microsoft representative told me. “At the time, Visual Studio was one of the most innovative tools to hit the market, a single IDE that increased developer productivity in all new ways.”
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Oh, I remember those days quite well.
In fact, my very first Microsoft campus visit, in December 1996, was for the initial Visual Studio reviewers workshop. At that time, it was code-named Boston, and the final shipping product was named Visual Studio 97.
I’ll be discussing this and other early Visual Studio memories as we get closer to the launch. For now, let’s see what’s happening this year.
Visual Studio 2017 will be launched virtually with a two-day live streaming event. It starts March 7 at 8:00 am (11:00 am ET) and features such Microsoft developer luminaries as Miguel de Icaza, Scott Hanselman, and others. During the event, they will demonstrate and explain new Visual Studio features, plus advances in related .NET, Xamarin, and Azure technologies. The second day will involve live interactive training. Sign up now.
I’ll have more soon. But many may not realize or remember that I got my start writing because of Visual Basic, and in the 1990s I wrote over a dozen books about Microsoft developer topics. So in many ways, the Visual Studio anniversary mirrors my own initial experiences with Microsoft.
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<p>Recent versions of VS have been drifting into Eclipse/AS territory with the need to fiddle with settings or separate downloads to get it to work. I hope they are returning to the single install experience.</p>
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<p>Paul’s comments about his books reminds me of bookcase after bookcase in bookstores for technical books that have shrunk to about one. The technical bookstores I used to frequent are pretty much extinct with Amazon and the Web. Kind of sad. The Internet can be a great resource, but the information is often fragmented and inferior to a book focused on a single topic IMO.</p>