Simultaneous with next Wednesday's launch of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft will release the beta version of Visual Studio 11, the next iteration of the company's hefty development environment. Visual Studio 11 and its partnering application lifecycle management system, Team Foundation Server 11, together contain "hundreds" of new features, with Microsoft talking up just a small selection prior to the beta release.

Microsoft also unexpectedly announced a cut-down version of TFS, TFS Express, that will be free and will support up to five users. This complements the current Visual Studio Express product, and gives small teams a zero-cost development environment, source control system, bug tracker, and more.

TFS 11 will include richer reporting, better tools for testers to report bugs (including the integration of screenshots and annotations, so that developers can be shown the problem), and PowerPoint storyboarding for business analysts.

Microsoft will also fill some of the ALM gaps that currently exist in TFS 11. There will be new integration with Systems Center Operations Manager to allow Ops to more easily give Dev teams the information they need to fix bugs found in production; Ops teams will be able to raise issues in TFS based on events in SCOM, and these issues will include information such as stack traces to help diagnose issues. There will also be a cut-down version of IntelliTrace that can be installed on servers with problem applications, to allow even more extensive data capture.

Visual Studio 11 has a number of improvements for the day-to-day task of actually writing software, too. A recurring problem with Visual Studio is finding stuff: both finding features within the Integrated Development Environment's extensive menus and dialog boxes, and finding source code within large and complex projects.

The first problem is similar to the one the Office team had to tackle (and solved with the ribbon), but the Visual Studio team's solution is less radical: there will be a search box in the IDE which allows searching for features and will present a list of matching items.

The solution to the second problem falls along the same lines; the built-in search tools have been extended, and Solution Explorer will include both filtering and the ability to drill down into classes. Users of Visual Studio 2010 may recognize these new features, as they are found in Microsoft-published extensions for that IDE. The company used the feedback from these extensions to guide the development of the comparable features in Visual Studio 11, and intends to continue to use extensions to deliver new features to Visual Studio users between major versions.

The news of these updates has been overshadowed, however, by a change to the appearance of the new IDE. Considering that it's essentially a glorified text editor, Visual Studio 2010 is remarkably colorful, with dozens of buttons, tabs, toolbars, palettes, and more.

But Visual Studio 11 has a look that's best described as "gray". In a bid to improve focus on the text and reduce distractions, the IDE has been stripped of much of its color. It is flatter and simpler, with the gradients, subdivisions, and other details removed. Some have likened this to Microsoft's Metro design, but in practice the closest visual predecessors look to be Office XP, Visual Studio 2003, and Expression Blend, which sport a similarly "flat" look-and-feel.

In addition to the standard gray theme, there is a second, much darker theme with the same flat styling.

The Visual Studio community has reacted noisily to the new look. Some like it; many do not, with repeated claims that it is "depressing" and imploring the company to at least introduce color back into toolbar buttons.

The Visual Studio 11 beta, along with .NET 4.5 beta, will be available from 29th February. They will also include a Go Live license, so Microsoft will support production deployment of applications built with them.