Unless you’re without power and can’t get to the Internet or watch TV, you’re likely aware that Microsoft’s BUILD conference is currently taking place. Microsoft kicked it off yesterday by showing off the next major upgrade for Windows, known as Windows 8, and today it focused on development for the platform.

According to the latest round of rumors, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer will make a surprise appearance at WWDC 2010 (7 minutes to be exact from Steve Jobs keynote) to announce Visual Studio 2010 for iPhone, iPad and Mac OS development. John Gruber of Daring Fireball reports the following.

Microsoft today has announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. In a press release today, the company announced that VS2010 and the new .NET Framework 4 will be available for developers after the launch event which is taking place in Las Vegas today. The final version of Silverlight 4 will also be available later this week.

Just found out this Visual Studio 2010 theme for Windows 7 and thought I should share it with you all. This theme includes 3 VS2010 wallpapers (wish they were widescreen), and has been put together by Rob Caron for all the .NET devs out there.

Here is a simple how-to guide on running Windows Phone 7 Series emulator without having to run the entire Visual Studio 2010 IDE. If you have installed the development tools (including Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows phone), you’ll notice that the .exe file for emulator (xde.exe) is automatically installed in C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\ location. Simply double clicking on Xde.exe file wont start the emulator as it requires some command line parameters.

Microsoft has just released the Release Candidate version of Visual Studio 2010 for public download. You can now download and try out Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4 RC before the final version which is due to hit retail in this first quarter of 2010.

Microsoft has just released Beta 2 milestone of the next version of Visual Studio to its MSDN subscribers. Testers who are enrolled in MSDN subscription program can now download and try out Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 before its public availability, which is scheduled for later this week.
Visual Studio 2010 is a monstrous and the most awaited release which is surely set to have a big impact on Microsoft platform developers in a positive way.

When working with WPF/Silverlight in Blend, it is quite irritating having to actually switch between Visual Studio and Blend throughout the course of the project by opening the project from its folder location again and again. I bet you might have wondered atleast once whether there was a way to open your project in Blend directly through Visual Studio!

Microsoft today has released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET Framework 4.0 to its MSDN subscribers. Visual Studio 2010 is a monstrous and the most awaited release which is surely set to have a big impact on Microsoft platform developers in a positive way.

Scott Guthrie has announced the availability of Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP in his keynote address at MIX conference in Vegas.

The Visual Studio Team over at Microsoft has introduced a very useful learning package to help learn about computer programming. Whether you are a teacher, a student of an Algorithms course or just a plain hobbyist; this package with its powerful feature-set could really get you started with some of the basic computer programming paradigms.

Microsoft today released a new updated CTP for Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008. Both the updates are labeled as January 2009 CTP.
Windows Azure SDK provides developers with the APIs, tools, documentation, and samples needed to develop Internet-scale applications that run on Windows Azure .