A senior Microsoft executive has announced that quality issues will delay the launch of the company’s premier developer tools — Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4— from their original date in March.
The disclosure came in a blog postThursday by S. Somasegar, senior vice president for Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) developer division.
Officially, Microsoft is adding more time to the testing cycle for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. That will push back the planned launch date, which had most recently been slated for March 22.
Microsoft released the second beta test copies of both products at the company’s Professional Developers Conference2009 in Los Angeles in October.
Since then, the feedback that the company received from developers was that the products still need work on performance and virtual memory usage.
“As a result, we are going to extend the beta period by adding another interim checkpoint release, a Release Candidate with a broad ‘go live’ license, which will be publicly available in the February 2010 timeframe,” Somasegar’s post said.
In Microsoft parlance, a “release candidate” is the final testing step before a product is released in final form. There can be one or more RC releases prior to final sign off of the code.
A New Timeframe For Release
“We are therefore moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4back a few weeks,” Somasegar added. However, he did not go any further in defining a new launch date for the tools suite.
A Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.comin an e-mail that the company has no further information regarding how far back the schedule will be pushed.
Among the new features coming in Visual Studio 2010 will be new Silverlight content creators. These will include a WYSISYG design interface, XAML IntelliSense support, data bindings and Windows Foundation Classes support.