Appearantly, the next version of Visual Studio, version 10, is starting to take shape. While no (public) CTP/early build has been released of this version, Microsoft is working hard on taking the IDE again one step further... Or should I say, many steps? Read on!
Jeffrey Schlimmer posted some information on his blog that outlines where Microsoft is taking the new version of Visual Studio, code-named Hawaii. It seems that there will be 4 main areas of, let's say, BIG improvements:
Experience: Make Visual Studio the developer's favorite application
Customer: Focus on a specific customer's needs; for this release, the small-to-medium business developer
Platform: Ride the latest platform technologies; for this release, the 2009 technologies
Architecture: Take the first of many steps to improve the infrastucture
Visual Studio will start taking advantage of WPF: the editor will be WPF-based and in general, VS10 will be more modular and have fine-grained extensibility. Multi-monitor and multi-core will also become available, as well as a more modern look, again based on WPF.
Also, while not becoming Notepad in terms of startup-time, VS will become smaller and faster. In my personal opinion, with every new version, the load time has been more and more reduced.