• Chart: Visual Studio .NET Packages and Pricing

Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) is generally available as of Feb. 13, 2002. The largest and most significant tool upgrade in Microsoft history, VS.NET has been available for download to MSDN subscribers since Jan. 16, but it is now available through retail and other channels as well.

Tools Support Web Services, Unify IDE

Moving to the .NET platform has brought major changes to the entire suite of tools. These changes include the following:

• Adoption of the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime to increase security, reliability, and cross-language interoperability.
• New tools to enable creating and using Web Services from all languages.
• A common integrated development environment (IDE) for all tools and languages.
• Stronger support for third-party languages and add-ons through the Visual Studio Integration Program. Products taking advantage of these capabilities include Rational ClearCase and XDE, Fujitsu Cobol and Fortran, and others.
• Major language enhancements to Visual Basic and the introduction of the new C# language.

(For detailed background on VS.NET and the .NET platform, see the Feb. 2002 Research Report, "The .NET Development Platform.")

Three Editions Available

VS.NET is available in three editions: Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Architect. The Professional and Enterprise Editions were available with previous versions of Visual Studio while the Enterprise Architect Edition is new to VS.NET.

The Professional Edition includes all of the Microsoft language products, the .NET Framework (including ASP.NET), and the core set of visual tools that any developer would require to build an application.

The Enterprise Edition adds support for team-based development with features such as source code control, as well as a set of templates to give developers a head start at building some common types of enterprise applications.

The new Enterprise Architect Edition adds support for application and database modeling based on Visio. It is significant because it marks a further attempt by Microsoft to move into the high-end tools and modeling products, an area that the company has traditionally left to third parties.

Pricing and System Requirements

Prices for Visual Studio.NET range from US$549 for upgrades of the Professional Edition to US$2,499 for new purchases of the Enterprise Architect Edition. (See the table "Visual Studio .NET Packages and Pricing".)

Visual Studio .NET requires Windows NT 4.0 or later and 3.5GB of disk space. It does not run on Windows 9x systems.

Resources

More information on .NET and Visual Studio are available in the Feb. 2002 Research Report, "The .NET Development Platform."

The Visual Studio home page is at msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio.

Specific information on the contents and pricing of the various editions is at msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy.