Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1

Microsoft has developed numerous developer friendly software products in

past- especially in terms of APIs, SDKs, documentation and of course their

development tools. The new version of Visual Studio 2008-till now better known

by its codename 'Orcas' -has been recently released as the first public Beta 1.

This release, as with every previous releases, raises the bar for developers and

introduces a large number of features that increase productivity and make the

life of developers' easier. Let's take a look at some of the new and interesting

features of this Beta.

.NET 3.5



Every version of Visual Studio targets a particular version of .NET. VS 2002

was .NET 1.0, VS 2003 was for .NET 1.1 and VS 2005 targeted .NET 2.0. VS 2008 by

default targets .NET 3.5-but you can now select which .NET version you wish to

target your code for at anytime-while creating the project or even during the

development. Obviously, if you're using a feature that an earlier version of

.NET doesn't support and you try to build using that platform, you will get an

error. So what is .NET 3.5 anyway? This version is actually a stack built on the

new features from .NET 3.0 and beyond-including things like the ASP.NET Ajax

Framework and others (which we will discuss shortly). Full support for the core

.NET 3.0 functionality is built in. That is, you can now develop WPF and WF apps

in both design and source mode without requiring to install add-ons. A large

number of project templates also allow you greater flexibility in choosing how

you wish to develop and deploy your application-for instance, when creating a

WPF application you can select whether to create a normal WPF application for

Windows, an XBAP Browser Application or a Custom WPF Control library.

ASP.NET



The great news for Web developers is that in this version of ASP.NET, stuff

like Ajax is built-in. That is, you can now start creating extremely dynamic

sites using Web 2.0 features very easily and quickly thanks to the server- and

client-side support for Ajax. Also included is the Ajax Control Toolkit-a

Microsoft supported, community driven set of drag-and-drop controls for Web

pages that enable cool Ajax functionality into your site without having to write

any code at all.

There are a lot of new project templates in VS 2008 when the default .NET Framework 3.5 is selected, however, they reduce when you change to .NET 3.0 or .NET 2.0

VSTO



The Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) also gets a facelift here and is

included out of the box. VSTO can not only target all the Office client

applications (such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook, Access and

InfoPath), but also include deep integration with all the Office server

components (such as WSS, MOSS 2007, Excel Services, Forms Services and WF).

You can develop anything from a new button on the Office 2007 Ribbon to

building extremely complex workflows that are going to be hosted in SharePoint

for using Excel or Forms services. This ability gives developers a large number

of options in making their projects, user tried and tested platforms, instead of

having to invest in developing code themselves.

LINQ



The Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a new feature of VS 2008 that allows

you to encapsulate different data sources into objects using a new modeling

technique and then use the simple LINQ object syntax to perform queries against

this model. For instance, if traditionally you were using SQL to query data from

RDBMS' and XPath/XQuery for XML, you now no longer need to do this. Instead of

using a graphical designer you can map each table or XML into objects (in

memory) and then use LINQ to select from or insert, update or delete the data

without having to know or care in which format is the actual data stored-in a DB

or in an XML. PCQuest had carried an article on LINQ a few months back.

Other enhancements



There are many other enhancements available in VS 2008. Some of them are

listed below:

Creating a WPF application allows you to change it both in the XAML code as well as in the designer interface

JavaScript IntelliSense



Finally, client side JavaScript also gets IntelliSense that allows

developers to write client side scripts for the Web much faster and with lesser

errors. You also get great client side debugging as well.

Web Designer



The Web page designer in VS 2008 has been significantly improved and allows

better handling of CSS and XHTML. Multi target for Web applications for .NET

2/3/3.5 is also available.

Team Suite Enhancements



Each of the Team Suite editions (Architect, Developer, DBA and Tester) has a

number of additional features included in the new version. The Team Foundation

Server also gets a number of new features-such as multithreaded builds,

continuous integration and more.

All in all, VS 2008 looks like a great new release that will come for

developers-with a number of features that will hopefully make the life of

developers easier and lead to better products overall in terms of security,

stability, reliability and user interface as well.