Next Visual Studio Announced

The first announcements of the next major version of Visual Studio (VS) were made at TechEd in May 2011. The upcoming enhancements to VS focus on improving application life-cycle management (ALM) by helping development teams, IT operations personnel, and application users work together better to design, develop, and manage software. Several new technologies were demonstrated, including an early build of VS “vNext,” a PowerPoint plug-in, and an extension to System Center Operations Manager (OM). The OM extension is the only component that is currently publicly available for trial and no release dates have yet been announced.

Main Focus Is Application Life-Cycle Management

The announcements of VS vNext centered on its support for broader ALM capabilities. ALM refers to the process of creation, deployment, and continual upkeep of software through collaboration among architects, developers, testers, project managers, operations personnel, and other stakeholders who design, code, test, deploy, maintain, and use applications. VS has supported ALM since VS Team System 2005 and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2005. (The Team System brand was discontinued with the release of VS 2010, but the functionality was carried forward with enhancements.)