Orcas RTM is upon us!
After a few failed attempts at taking home the 42″ 1080p Plasma HDTV which was on sale (for barely 2 secs) at the WalMart store (that is, with today being the day after Thanksgiving and all), I return to work, though quite bitter and reluctant to do anything productive, but to remind you that Microsoft has released Visual Studio (VS) 2008 and the .NET 3.5 framework (codenamed Orcas) to manufacturing (RTM) – as of, Monday Nov. 19th.
What are some of the compelling reasons to switch to VS 2008?
- Well, Web | Graphic Designers (and Front-End Developers) can finally sing Hallelujah!
The VS 2008 IDE (Integrated Development Environment) has great CSS editing features, intellisense support for JavaScript and better yet, JavaScript debugging all within the VS IDE. Needless to say, I know a few friends who will be excited about this feature 
. Wink! Wink!!
- Improved language and data features like LINQ (Language Integrated Query), will help reduce the heavy lifting and provide you with access to data irrespective of where it is housed. Check out Scott Gu’s series on LINQ to SQL.
- You don’t have to loose sleep over what it means to maintain your existing .NET 2.0 Apps, in case you decide to install VS 2008. VS 2008 affords you the luxury of targeting multiple versions of the .NET Framework (2.0, 3.0, 3.5), by allowing you to develop for different versions of the framework with one tool.
What I don’t find quite electrifying about this feature is the fact that, VS 2008 makes some changes to the .NET 2.0-based project solution file which, unfortunately, prevents it from being opened with VS 2005. In other words, it is not backward-compatible. The work-around is to maintain 2 different solution files which point to the same set of projects – one created with VS 2005 and the other with VS 2008. It sounds like a pain in the rear end. This is quite a concern when you have several developers (with different IDE versions) working on a project solution, concurrently.
If these reasons tickle your fancy, perhaps you can go ahead and check out the free version (or Express Edition) of Visual Web Developer 2008.
Inasmuch as I am not a huge Microsoft groupie, I must admit that I just installed the Express Edition this morning, and I ‘am loving’ it already!
