By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Jun. 9, 2008

The following an excerpt of a Product Roadmap report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Roadmap diagrams summarize major product releases and retirements. Past releases (e.g., Visual Studio .NET and Visual Studio 2005) are white boxes, and probable future releases (e.g., Visual Studio 2008 SP1) are gray. The end of Mainstream support for a version (e.g., for Visual Studio .NET) is indicated by a black octagon.

Arrows show important relationships among version releases, which in turn can help predict the order and spacing of releases. A heavy black arrow links a product to its successor; for example, Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Black arrows also show bundling or integration relationships, such as the fact that the .NET Framework 3.5 is delivered in Visual Studio 2008. Finally, dashed gray arrows indicate important cross-release dependencies or compatibility relationships, such as the fact that the Silverlight 2.0 platform depends on the .NET Framework 3.5.