Today is the first day of the the Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference, about which I wrote some time ago.

There are some great sessions about Visual Studio, Shell, DSLs and VSTS, most of which are focused on product developers. This morning Rico Mariano, the Visual Studio Chief Architect, presented the kick off and talked about his pillars for the next Visual Studio versions. While Dev10 is underway, long term planning for Dev11 and Dev12 has already started. In general he said the teams will focus on Visual Studio being extensible (very relevant to this audience), scalable (Rico is a performance guy), modern, connected and frugal. The message was presented with some great anecdotes on the side from his years of experience on related teams since late 80s.

Each next version of Visual Studio should also be good looking, focused on a certain group of end users and obviously support the latest hardware and software.

Good stuff! Session decks are posted here