5 reasons to check out Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
- Its all about Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Quite an old video :-), but the gist is about right - this release is all about improving developer productivity, so even if you don't want to target the .NET framework 3.5 you can still take advantage of features like:
- CSS editing support (really helpful in figuring out what rules are actually being applied on your page, is aware of overloaded rules etc.)
- Javascript intellisense and debugging - great for example if you want to write a control such as those you'll find in the AJAX Control Toolkit
- IDE support for nested master pages
- and more...
This [ability to benefit from the above even if not targeting 3.5] is possible because of...
- Framework multi-targeting. Previously the version of Visual Studio had to match up against the version of the .NET framework you were targeting. For for example, VS 2003 & .NET 1.1, VS 2005 and .NET 2.0. In VS 2008, when you create a new project you have the option of selecting which version of the framework you wish the project to target:
- Go Live License - if you want to use the new 3.5 features in production applications, you can, and you might want to because there's lots of cool...
- ...new stuff - C# 3.0 (e.g. auto implemented properties - remember, productivity), LINQ to SQL, LINQDataSource, partial methods (use to apply validation rules when using LINQ), ListView control (full control over the HTML that's produced, no spans or tables), ASP.NET AJAX included out of the box, and on and on. I intend to blog more about some of these features in the coming days.
- It's easy to try - this is not going to be a VS 2003->VS 2005-type-experience. Also, the VPCs come pre-installed with any pre-requisite software, so if you want to try e.g. CI with VS TFS 2008 just download the VPC and you can have an automated build up in no time (OK, it'll take a while to download, I mean in no time from when you actually start the VPC :-))