I guess we'll have to see how the cloud stuff compares to Amazon or Google. Is it too little too late, or is there something there. More talk of standards compliance would be good, otherwise I can only assume these things are designed to lead to vendor (MS) lock in.

I used to be a big user of Visual Studio, but just wandered away from it as the new features just don't seem relevant. Don't really see anything here of interest. I think the open source tools are now all good enough for software development that something expensive like VS just doesn't have a role anymore. Eclipse has had modeling as a fundamental part for a long time (not that I use it).

Smist08

Do you know that VS Express (free tools) can also help one build amazing .NET applications (Web-based, smart client and SOA style web services) without buying anything?

I am surprised that you haven't kept track of what's included in .NET 3.0 (WCF, WF, WPF, WCS) and 3.5 (Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework). They provide lot of value in case you do little bit of reading and play with it.

Have you checked out Silverlight (cross-platform and cross-browser plugin) for building RIA (Rich Internet Apps). One can use both Visual Studio and designer focused Expression tools (Expression Blend, Expresion Design, Expression Encoder) to build both Silverlight and WPF applications.

SQL Server 2008 also makes it easy for Visual Studio developers to build dynamic, BI style and spatial applications.

VS 2008 is cool today, but VS 2010/.NET FW 4.0 with modeling capabilities and cloud computing platform will raise the bar even higher. It will overshadow every other thing out there.

I guess it depends on whether you believe in open standards. Whether you believe in the WWW as an open international standards based platform. A lot of people (myself included) think this is fundamental, worth protecting and of huge long term benefit to all software developers.

VS does a fair bit, if you are willing to give up web standards and lock your app into running only on Windows Servers and only having Windows clients running IE. If you are interested in following open web standards, not requiring any plugins, activeX controls or other program downloads, then it doesn't give you much.

There is far to much decision making in these product's design oriented to MS lockin rather than satisfying developer needs.

Smist08..
Do you know what you are talking??
Who told you that we can run asp.net apps in IE only?? The asp.net websites can be accessed on Firefox[All Operating systems], Macs, Linux and any O/S that has a decent browser.
I understand that currently .net runs only on windows servers but that does not prevent it from emitting standards compliant html markup.... Do your research before you blabber...
Let me repeat that for you... .Net web apps DO NOT require windows clients/Active X to access. They can be accessed from ANY O/S. Now, say that 10 times..

Although you can do pure HTML/Javascript webapps from .net and VS, that clearly isn't the direction they are taking. They are pushing Silverlight which requires a subset of the .Net runtime installed on the client. For all the talk of using Mono, this is not something supported by MS and its tools, nor does it really work properly. Yes if you have the discipline to keep to a subset of MS tools you can do it. But you are constantly being pushed to Windows/.Net only clients in IE.

smist08 :
THis guy does not know anything concrete and is here just to bash MSFT. VS.NET is one of the very open platform. .NET tie in is natural as MSFT is in the business of selling platforms and not in the business of selling hardware like Sun or apple. If you don't like the platform don't use it. VS.NET supports XML, HTTP, SOAP, XHTML, you name it. Just do your research before bashing. Silverlight is a parallel strategy to compete with Flash/Flex. It gives MSFT the ability to deliver rich content to the browser where tradition tech. fails. If there is a standard there, only MSFT will push it, as Adobe has no interest.

I guess I'm just jaded by results I've seen of too many projects. We start using VS.Net with the intent of being open and supporting all browsers, but due to time constraints, some "convenience" feature of .Net or the MS stack gets used and we find our application only using IE. This gets baked in and is too hard to fix later. Now we are left with an application that can't be used from Mac, Linux, iPhone, and any number of other devices, plus an extremely high estimate of the work required to fix it.
Another problem .Net Webforms have is that the advanced controls used are extremely chatty. This behavior makes them slow and uses up network bandwidth. Plus there is no way to control this. Most other toolkits give you tight/complete control over when server calls are made, .Net doesn't seem to allow this. Of course again you could not use these controls, but then these are one of .Net's big selling points.