The Sikh Geek

I was at the MSDN Event in Birmingham this afternoon entitled “Overview of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5″ presented by Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty of the Microsoft Developer Group. I was really glad I went because it convinced me that I should start using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Daniel did a good job of convincing me that VS 2008 was a true superset of VS 2005 and as the CLR has stayed the same from Framework 2.0 -> 3.0 -> 3.5 then there’s no great problem. Framework 3.5 is a superset of the preceeding Frameworks. The headline feature in .NET 3.5 is the new language construct called LINQ (Language Integrated Query). Think of it as a SQL like syntax for working with all sorts different data types, be they objects, datasets or databases. This really shows the power of the .NET runtime, that such new language constructs can be developed without any changes in the underlying CLR. So, you’re just getting the compiler to do some clever stuff for you and produce the appropriate IL.

What you get in VS 2008 is a really productive environment with intellisense and they’ve added the Expression Web editors for CSS support. Having been using Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer 2007 recently, these are really great tools. Also, VS 2008 has extensions for doing things like Sharepoint Workflow, Office Business Applications, etc all built in. Also, it’s got new Visual designer for WPF, so it you’re wanting to do Vista based development then this is the tool of choice.

Right, I’m off to download VS 2008 Beta 2 and Framework 3.5 from my MSDN Subscription…