A Lap around VS2008

The first presentation at Tech Ed I went to was that of Tony Goodhew’s, who gave a presentation of what’s new in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. I had already downloaded and played around with Beta 2 and didn’t find the presentation that useful, but this was obviously targeted at people who did not know much about the product and consisted of both features specific to VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Some of the main points highlighted in the presentation were -

• Support for the language advances
• 400+ new features: This is more or less the same that were done for 2005
• Web Designer enhancements: This includes the integration of the Expression web design panel into Visual studio and better CSS support. I quite liked the original Expression Web product and am quite happy with this integration
• ASP .NET enhancements: Better XHMTL/JavaScript debugging/intellisense support as well as the integration of ASP.NET AJAX.
• Multi-targeting support: This is basically the support for the different .NET versions within the one product. This means that you can build Apps for .NET 3.5, 3.0 and 2.0 using VS 2008. (Note: Although projects maybe backward compatible, the Solution file is not)
• Client Application Services: This can be used to store Enterprise wide Personalization information/settings for applications.
• WPF Support: Although you may still need Expression Blend to do things like animation and triggers visually, the product offers support for XAML apps.
• WCF Support: Bunch of tools to support this and the ability to Create-Run-Test-Consume WCF services easily
• Office 12 support
• Local Data caching