Visual Studio 2010 has a new ship date.
Originally scheduled to launch on March 22, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) abruptly pushed that date back late last month, after the company decided it needed to extend testing to achieve quality standards.
At that time, officials said they were introducing an additional “release candidate” — the final testing step in Microsoft’s development life cycle — for both Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.
The company had said that would push the launch back by “a few weeks.”
Now, Microsoft has set April 12 as the official ship date, according to a one-sentence post on the blog of Rob Caron, a content architect at Microsoft.
“Short but sweet, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010,” Caron’s blog postsaid Wednesday night.
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 entered their second beta test phase in November at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC)in Los Angeles.
Among the features being added to Visual Studio and .NET Framework 4 in the 2010 editions are support for Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, as well as tools to simplify writing touch-enabled applications for Windows 7.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the network for technology professionals.