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A couple weeks ago, I gave you guys a sneak peek at Windows Server 2008 Beta 3. Well, what good
is a brand spanking new server platform without the development tools to properly utilize it?
This week I spent some time with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.
Everything discussed and shown in this article is based on Visual Studio 2008
Beta 2 Standard Edition. As with all betas, some minor things may change before release,
but this version is feature complete, so for the most part, you can expect things to be
pretty close to what they'll look like in the release version due out early next year.
The other exciting thing to notice is that Microsoft is providing a Go-Live license for Beta 2 meaning
you can basically use it to develop applications and deploy them today.
Setup
I had been planning on installing the beta on a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 instance running Windows 2000, but
when I tried to do so, I was greeted by a somewhat confusing error message:
This product cannot be installed on Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows NT. You must install Windows 2000 or later and rerun setup.
After a few seconds of thinking maybe it was some sort of Virtual PC compatibility problem, I rechecked the
minimum requirements and found that along with Win XP, Win Vista, or Win Server 2003 it also wants at
least 1GB of available system memory.
After a little reconfiguring of my Virtual PCs I ran setup again... this time on Win XP Pro.
The setup routine is similar to previous versions of Visual Studio.
The only real delay which I wasn't expecting was when setup stopped to send
feedback about the install to Microsoft. It probably only took a few seconds, but it
felt like it was longer then it should have been.
Considering the number of components installed, it went pretty quickly.
I installed from an iso file mounted as a virtual DVD drive so that probably helped speed things
up, but the whole install probably took less then 15 minutes, even with my stopping to take
screen shots along the way.
Setup did require a reboot, so after restarting Windows I went ahead and ran
Visual Studio.
Running Visual Studio 2008 for the First Time
Once again, nothing too shocking here. Running Visual Studio 2008 pops
up a standard splash screen as it loads.
Visual Studio does ask you to choose a set of
default environment settings the first time you run it.
I always pick Web Development since that's what I do the
most and find that setting gets me as close to the old
Visual Interdev style as I can get.
Voila... welcome to Visual Studio 2008... looks a lot like
Visual Studio 2005. I think it's safe to say that this
release is not a revolutionary departure from the Visual Studio
we're all used to.
Perhaps the most visual change is in the new Web designer. It has better
CSS support and supports split view which allows you to see both the markup
and a rendered verion while you're editing.
What's New in Visual Studio 2008
Even though I just said that Visual Studio 2008 doesn't look to be a
revolutionary upgrade, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of goodies to go around.
Some of the notable improvements include:
- LINQ support
- .NET Framework 3.5 support
- ASP.NET AJAX now built into the .NET Framework
- Improved JavaScript Intellisense and debugging
- Improved Web designer with better CSS support (based on Expression Web)
- Nested Master Pages
- ASP.NET ListView control
- Multi-targeting - allows you to target different versions of the .NET Framework. Finally one dev environment for .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5!!!
Conclusion
Hopefully this quick look at the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 release has given you an idea
about what you can expect from the next version of Visual Studio. Existing Visual Studio users should have
little trouble adapting and taking advantage of the features of the new environment.
While LINQ and AJAX are probably the new features which will be hyped the most, personally I'm excited
about the simple fact that we've finally got an enviroment that will target different versions of the
.NET Framework.
If you'd like more information about Visual Studio 2008, there's plenty of it to be found.
Microsoft has a number of sites dedicated to covering the new product.
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