[UPDATE: The following post was just a joke for April’s Fools Day and we hope you had a good laugh with us. It’s not for real. Or ... is it? In the Matrix you can never tell. JMB.]
GLENDALE, CA., 4/1/2010. In a deal to be formally announced at DevConnections on April 12 at the time Visual Studio 2010 is released, DevExpress has acquired all rights, intellectual property, and development teams for prior versions of Visual Studio (2002, 2003, 2005, and 2008). Microsoft spokesman Flip O’Roal explained “Visual Studio 2010 shows the way forward both in using WPF within the IDE and in designing and developing applications with WPF and Silverlight. The older WinForms support is tedious to maintain, so we’re happy that DevExpress, being the premier third-party vendor of WinForms controls, have taken over the mature Visual Studio product line with a view to producing a competing IDE for .NET developers.” Avril Poisson, Program Manager for the Visual Studio 2010 UI, added, “We feel we have the better product of course but we recognize that there are a lot of WinForms developers still out there. May the best IDE win!”
“No doubt, it’s a big opportunity for us,” said Julian Bucknall, CTO for DevExpress, “and we have high hopes for success. For a start we shall at long last have the ability to make Visual Studio an add-in to CodeRush.” Mark Miller, Chief Architect for DevExpress’ IDE productivity tools, clarified: “Once CodeRush drives Visual Studio, you can expect even more stunning refactorings, better code templates and navigation, and more complete code issue analysis than ever before.”
Because of various copyright issues, Visual Basic is not part of the deal. “That, of course, is no problem,” explained Joe King, Senior Developer. “At DevConnections, we’ll also be announcing the public beta for our new VD Remedy add-in which will convert Visual Basic code to Delphi for compilation with our new Delphi back-end.” Negotiations are in train to encourage Anders Hejlsberg to transfer to DevExpress to head this initiative.
For more details on this momentous deal, we strongly advise you to visit the DevExpress Visual Studio acquisition page.