Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft had promised that Visual Studio 2008 (codename “Orcas”) would be released in 2007 and now the date is sometime this month:

BARCELONA, Spain — Nov. 5, 2007 — Today, during the keynote address at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007, S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp., announced that Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007.

Microsoft has made available a high level overview of  the Visual Studio 2008 features, but I like to think of it as the first tool release with complete Vista support including the Cider visual designer.

Additionally Microsoft also announced:

• “The first CTP of the Microsoft Sync Framework demonstrates Microsoft’s ongoing investments in synchronization and builds on the synchronization functionality available in Visual Studio 2008. With Visual Studio 2008, developers can rapidly take advantage of offline synchronization capabilities to sync-enable applications and services easily with rich designer support. The Microsoft Sync Framework extends the support featured in Visual Studio 2008 to also include offline and peer-to-peer collaboration using any protocol for any data type, and any data store.”
• “A new release of Popfly Explorer will add new Web tools that provide Web developers and Popfly users an easy way to add Silverlight gadgets built in Popfly to their Web pages, as well as publish HTML Web pages directly to Popfly.”
• “In response to partner feedback and in order to provide better support for interoperability with other developer tools and cross-platform scenarios, Microsoft is today announcing plans to change licensing terms, no longer limiting partners to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only.”

The first one helps Microsoft fight the data sharing advantage of Web-based applications, the second gives Popfly a bit of a boost, and the third apparently addresses some esoteric needs.