Visual Studio Beta 2 Professional Available For Download

If you'd missed it ... Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Professional was made available for download last Friday. The marketing blurb about it is below. Note : if you already have the Windows Mobile 6 SDK or SDK Refresh installed, you'll need to re-install it after you're done with installing the VIsual Studio 2008 Beta 2.

 

Download Link

 

Visual Studio 2008 delivers on Microsoft’s vision of smart client applications by letting developers quickly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences. This beta is intended for early adopters of the Microsoft technology, platform, and tools offerings. We designed this release to let developers try out new technology and product changes, but not to build production systems. This limitation is fully covered in the Microsoft Software License Terms that accompany this beta.

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is available for download from July 27th 2007 and introduces several new features for mobile developers.

New Features for Mobile Developers

· Unit testing is now available to mobile developers

o Developers have told us that testing mobile applications is time consuming and costly. Visual Studio 2008 enables automated functional testing of managed code to reduce that burden.

· Latest Device Emulator (version 3.0)

o You can now automate testing scenarios in the device emulator allowing you to simulate real world changes in device state – signal dropoff, battery running dead etc

· Latest .NET Compact Framework (version 3.5)

o .NET Compact Framework 3.5 introduces new features like LINQ as well as an implementation of the Windows Communication Foundation enabling device to device and device to server communication over the Exchange Activesync transport

· Designer support for SQL Server 3.5 Compact Edition

o You can now build SQL Server 3.5 Compact Edition applications using the Visual Studio 2008 designer experience

Mobile developers will need to use Visual Studio 2008 Professional Beta 2 and above to build Windows Mobile applications.

Supported Platforms

· .NET Compact Framework 3.5

· .NET Compact Framework 2.0

· .NET Compact Framework 1.0 (projects will be upgraded to 2.0)

· Windows Mobile 6 (by installing the Windows Mobile 6 SDK Refresh)

· Windows Mobile 5.0

· Pocket PC 2003 (managed and native code)

· Smartphone 2003 (native code only)

· Windows Embedded CE 6.0

· Windows Embedded CE 5.0