In the first session of the day I stepped into Tony Goodhew's overview of Visual Studio 2008 (previously Orcas).
The session covered VS2008 Pro (as opposed to the Team editions) and was a slick high level flight over the product.
Answering the question of WHY?, Tony gave three reasons:
- Tools for Office 2007 and Vista
- Improvements for Web developers
- Language enhancements (especially data handling eg LINQ)
The reasons are compelling, even if some are no more than catchup (eg the split view - touted as an improvement for Web devs - has been in FrontPage for years).
I won't be giving a recap of sessions or what was covered, instead just summarizing what the most compelling answers to WHY? are for me.
Here's why I think we should move to VS2008 asap:
- You can target multiple versions (ie you just select whether you are targeting .Net 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5), so there is no downside, but plenty of upside
- LINQ data handling is just about ready :-)
- Support for Vista
- Support for Office 2007 development (more on this in a later post)
Beta 2 has just been released.