Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Time-Sensitive Offers

With the Visual Studio 2010 Launch fast approaching on April 12, Microsoft has announced two new offers and wants to remind potential customers of a bargain whose time is drawing to a close.

The Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Offer: Back in October of 2009 Microsoft announced the Ultimate edition of Visual Studio 2010 and the Ultimate Offer. Dave Mendlen, the senior director of developer marketing for Visual Studio, explains that “This is the offer where volume licensing customers with an MSDN premium subscription automatically are upgraded to the highest version of Visual Studio. They need to take action and get the most out of their software that they can by buying the right level of licensing for them by April 12. It’s effectively almost a software giveaway. You can go to a higher level of the product and get more software than you’re paying for. So,if you’re going to be getting the next level of software for the next three years, now is the time to do it. Gotta buy now if you want to take advantage of the automatic upgrade at the launch.” After that date customers just pay the Ultimate edition price.

The Standard Offer: Microsoft announced this promotion to ensure that their current Standard edition customers can easily transition to Visual Studio 2010. If you bought Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard edition you can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 at the previous Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition $299 retail price. You’ll need to act fast if you want to take advantage of this offer. The offer period is April 12, 2010 through October 12, 2010. Mendlen notes that Microsoft created this offer for “individual developers buying retail.” He explains that “It’s a special version of Visual Studio designed to work with Windows 2008 Standard to move customers forward. They’ll get SharePoint support, Office support, Silverlight support, multi-monitor, the new WPF-based editor, things to extend the environment for third-party add-ons in the Visual Studio Gallery. After October the offer goes away. You’ll have a choice of either using Express, the free version of Visual Studio or buying up to Professional.”

The Visual Studio Professional Retail Offer: Microsoft announced that MSDN Essentials, a one-year trial MSDN subscription, will be included with every retail copy of Visual Studio Professional sold. Mendlen says, “Traditionally the VSPro developers who buy retail have not had access to MSDN subscriptions. If you bought the volume licensing you probably did have an MSDN subscription. We think every professional developer deserves an MSDN subscription. The retail price for Visual Studio for these people if they don’t have a tool is $799. If you upgrade either from a competitive tool or a previous version of Visual Studio the price is $541. So for the price of Visual Studio Professional now they all get subscriptions to MSDN Essentials. These customers for the first time can test the latest versions of our core platform—they get Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, as well as 20 hours a month of Windows Azure and access to MSDN online concierge. So think of it as a basic MSDN subscription as opposed to the whole MSDN. It’s not all the platforms, and it’s not all the versions. It’s just the latest versions.”

For more on these offer announcements see Microsoft Senior Vice President of the Developer Division Somasegar’s blog http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/ .