Visual Studio 2011 beta

If you're lucky enough to be able to get hold of a copy, the Visual Studio 2011 beta is available now.

Filled with great new features including a lot of stuff aimed at building metro style applications, Visual Studio 2011 carries on a long tradition of programming IDE excellence.

Metro style applications, originally only available as a scripting solution is now a full fledged C# or Visual Basic programming target so your applications can indeed contain all that you might expect from compiled managed code.

A simulator will be included for testing of Metro apps that are targeting phones or tablets as well as touch screen PC's, great if your development kit doesn't actually include a touch screen (I must fix that!)

You can do remote debugging. This is so useful if you need to debug the exact experience as it appears on the target device. I've used a version of this on my Gadgeteer but I'm looking forward to debugging live on my phone.

Microsoft are also really pushing the store. Create and manage your Windows store developer account and publish applications to the store. Windows Phone is sadly lagging behind iPhone and Android in terms of application availability so Microsoft obviously have a strong desire to make this process as easy as possible, unlike Apple who seem to want to get in the way of the process as much as possible.

Visual Studio 2011 also places great emphasis on code quality. This is an area which has almost never been used in the past except where consultants like me get called in to find out why a long running project is dying. With Visual Studio 2011 you get those tools built in and integrated into your build process from day 1.

I'm greatly looking forward to the final release. Lets get this beta over with Microsoft!!