A little pet peeve of mine is when people incorrectly refer to the Developer Preview (or the upcoming Beta) as Visual Studio 2011 instead of the correct Visual Studio 11.

The "11" refers to the version number (internally we call it Dev11). What the product will be called when it is released is anyone's guess (it could keep the name or it could have a year appended to it, or it could be something else, who knows). Even if it does have a year appended to the name, I think it is a safe bet it won't be last year!

For reference, version 10 was the previous version of Visual Studio which happened to be released in 2010, hence it got the name Visual Studio 2010. That is what confuses new people to this product I guess... they think that the two-digit number matches the year, just because it coincided like that last year. (btw, internally we called it Dev10).

For further reference, older releases were: Visual Studio 2008 (v9) aka "Orcas", Visual Studio 2005 (v8) aka "Whidbey", Visual Studio .NET 2003 (v7.1) aka "Everett", and Visual Studio .NET 2002 (v7) aka "Rainier". Before that, we were in the pre-.NET era with Visual Studio 6 (where the version and the product name matched, without the year appended to the name).

So next time you hear someone saying "Visual Studio 2011", point them to this post for some mini-education... thanks.