Steve Lange describes the new Visual Studio 2010 products and pricing in a post on his blog. Most notably, gone are the role-based Visual Studio Team System SKUs that we’ve had since the 2005 release. In their place we have Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium and Ultimate editions, plus a Test Professional edition.

To be clear, the capabilities and functionality you’ve come to know in Team System are still there, and, indeed, considerably enhanced. But clearly, buying the products based on your role in software development didn’t pan out the way Microsoft expected. We saw the an indication of that when they released the “Data Dude” edition of Team System, and then backtracked to combine the Database and Developer editions.

On the backend, Team Foundation Server is still there. And Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition is a free version aimed at education, hobbyists, and other entry-level audiences.

I have been using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 since November 2009, and I’ve been happy with most aspects aside from performance. It is, after all, still a Beta release. That status notwithstanding, it does have a “Go Live” license so you can put your solutions into production if you are comfortable with the facts of life working with prerelease software development tools.

For more details about the product line, visit the Visual Studio 2010 product page. Oh, and tell them Visual Stuart sent you.