After much anticipation, today at TechEd Developers in Barcelona, Spain, S. “Soma” Somasegar, Corporate Vice President in Microsoft’s Developer Division (pictured on the cover of .NET Developer's Journal, announced Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 will be released by the end of November 2007. Somasegar also unveiled a number of resources for developers enabling them to make the most of out of their Microsoft tools investments, including;

· Changes to the Visual Studio 2008 licensing terms which will provide better support for interoperability with other developer tools and cross-platform scenarios, no longer limiting partners to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only.

· A shared source licensing program for Premier-level partners in the Visual Studio Industry Partner program which will enable partners to view Visual Studio IDE source code for debugging purposes, and simplify the process of integrating their products with Visual Studio 2008.

· The release of the first Sync Framework CTP which will empower developers to create solutions that enable peer-to-peer collaboration and online/offline synchronization.  Microsoft’s ongoing investment in synchronization builds on the synchronization functionality available in Visual Studio 20008 so that developers can easily synchronize information using any protocol, any data type, and any data store.

· The availability of Popfly Explorer which adds integration into Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 and provides users an easy way to add Silverlight gadgets built in Popfly to their Web pages, as well as publish HTML Web pages directly to Popfly.

These latest releases are part of the broader Microsoft Application Platform, a portfolio of technology capabilities and core products through which Microsoft aims to help organizations develop, deploy and manage applications and IT infrastructure.