Many of you might be thinking, what's this Nokia N95 Ad catch line doing up here. Now, all that I can say is, the new Visual Studio 2008 is not just yet another release, its pretty much more than that.
There has been huge number of improvements in the latest Visual Studio and covering up each and everyone is beyond the scope of this post. So I'll be pointing out key objects.
- Multi-Targeting Support.
- Better AJAX and Javascript Support.
- Rich HTML/CSS WYSIWYG Designer.
- Significantly Improved Data Support
Multi-Targeting Support - Few weeks back Scott Guthrie blogged about this amazing new feature. One of the big changes that you are going to experience starting from VS 2008 release is to support what is call "Multi-Targeting" - which means that Visual Studio will now support targeting multiple versions of the .NET Framework, and developers will be able to start taking advantage of the new features Visual Studio provides without having to always upgrade their existing projects and deployed applications to use a new version of the .NET Framework library.
Better AJAX and JavaScript Support - As all might know how frustrating it was by manually typing Javascript before, you are going to be in for a pleasant treat with "Orcas". Visual Studio now provides full Javascript Intellisense completion in .ASPX files, .HTM files, as well as in external .JS files. It delivers Intellisense for vanilla Javascript code, as well as provides rich support for the new ASP.NET AJAX client Javascript framework and Javascript code built with it.
Rich HTML/CSS WYSIWYG Designer
- Split View Support (the ability to have both HTML Source and WYSIWYG design open simultaneously)
- Extremely rich CSS support (CSS property window, CSS inheritance viewer, CSS preview, and CSS manager)
- Dramatically improved view switching performance (moving from source->html design mode is now nearly instantaneous)
- Support for control designers within source view (property builders, event wire-up and wizards now work in source view)
- Richer ruler and layout support (better yet, values can be automatically stored in external CSS files)
- Designer support for nested master pages
Significantly Improved Data Support - VS2008 will include support for LINQ - which makes data access with .NET radically better by making the concept of querying a first class programming concept.
Wish to try Visual Studio 2008 Beta1?