• Enhanced Collaborations – between designers and developers make it much easier to create more compelling user experiences. Designers can use Microsoft Expression Web to design a User Interface (UI) and then turn it over to the developers with faith that the subsequent developed business logic code will result with UI design remaining intact.
• Improved Mobile Development – within both the Professional and Team systems makes it even easier to extend desktop applications to mobile base devices. Along with .NET Framework 3.5, there are enhanced mobile Windows Forms controls that make it easy to modify and optimize mobile applications' screens to support the mobile devices' smaller displays.
• Silverlight Support – is included via a Silverlight SDK and Silverlight Tools for VS08. This is a rich internet application technology that includes a subset of WPF.
Other enhancements
• JavaScript Intelesense
• Nested ASP.NET master page support at design time
• Rich CSS editing and layout support within the WYSIWYG designer
• Split View Designer for having both source and designer visible at the same time
OK, as with any release of a new version of Visual Studio, there are two questions that need to be answered. First, is this early release ready for prime time, and second is it really worth the upgrade? I have been running Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition for a few weeks now and I have not experienced any problems that could not be traced back to my own fault. In doing some web research, I did find a hot fix that is posted on the MSDN blog that is a performance fix with regards to some sluggishness when working in Design View, but everything on this release appears to be pretty clean.
The next question on is this version worth the upgrade? My personal opinion is that it is most definitely worth the upgrade. I guess that if you are writing console apps in unmanaged C++ you can probably skip the upgrade, but if you are doing anything modern especially with regards to application or web development, you will be letting your competition get the upper hand if you don't upgrade.
The WPF, WCF, and LINQ are alone worth the upgrade and when you add VSTO, JavaScript Intelesense, Multi-Framework, and ASP.NET AJAX, to me it becomes a no-brainer.
Article comments
1 - Tyler Folsom
MSVC 2008 has a serious flaw: it produces non-portable binaries. I am used to writing a simple program and being able to copy it to a customer's computer and execute it. You can't do that anymore. Copying the EXE and DLLs to the target directory doesn't work anymore The problem has to do with DLLs. You get programs expecting different versions of DLLs, so Microsoft did something about it. All DLLs have been moved to the WindowsSxS directory and given names decorated with arbitrary strings. OK, I can live with figuring out how to build an install project, running it, and then installing the package on the target computer. Problem is, that's not enough. Once you do the installation and try to execute the program you get an obscure error message about initialization failing. It suggests that you reinstall the program, but of course that doesn't help.
There are three work-arounds:
1) Install the VC run-time on the target computer. The run-time is free, but it is a 92M download and takes a while to install. People who never program should not need a compiler on their computer.
2) Use static linking of the run-time libraries, which will blow up your program size.
3) Use MSVC 2005.
The third solution is the most elegant.
The 2008 version of Visual Studio has added some new goodies on the Tools and Test tabs, which I never use. It is set up to allow access to the web and databases. I don't use any of that either, since I write scientific programs for use in-house. Before installing VC 2008, make sure that the new features give you value that outweigh the non-portability of the produced executable code.