SKU’d again

Another Visual Studio Release and another round of SKU’s. It seems the marketing folks in Redmond that had a hand in this where the same ones that brought us the Vista and Windows 7 product line up.

So here is the basic break down of the Old versus the New SKU’s for Visual Studio 2010.

• Visual Studio Standard and Visual Studio Professional become VS 2010 Professional
• Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium and Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Professional become VS 2010 Professional with MSDN
• Visual Studio Team Dev, Database, Architect and Test become VS 2010 Premium with  MSDN
• The Visual Studio Team Suite becomes VS 2010 Ultimate with MSDN

  Of course Express is still available as before for the hobbyist, as before one for each language. There is also a combo install for express, but quite frankly I haven’t had time to look at it.

Microsoft is also offering an upgrade offer for MSDN Premium subscribers during the “transition” time, that will allow you to activate a premium subscription now and get Ultimate when Visual Studio 2010 is released in or around March of 2010.

In the end I find these marketing name games a pain, I like the seeming simplification, the names are to Windowy for my taste.