Dave Bost

Now that I’m able to poke my head above water after a barrage of meetings since Monday, I come late to the party to inform you (like you didn’t already know) that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 (aka Orcas) have shipped.

One of the best features of Visual Studio 2008 is Multi-targeting. Multi-targeting provides the ability to target your development for applications based on .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 or .NET 3.5. The tool adopts to your selection. If you select .NET 2.0, the project items and toolbox is filtered down to what’s only available as part of .NET 2.0. If you select .NET 3.5, then the items for .NET 3.5 are available. This gives you a much simpler path in maintaining your existing applications or upgrading them to the latest Framework features. It seems like such a simple feature, but it provides a powerful value.

Visual Studio also provides great enhancements for the web developer. The VS team “borrowed” some of the great CSS editing capabilities found in Expression Web and brought them over to Visual Studio. Also, the JavaScript support in VS2008 is unbelievable. Not only do we get intellisense support for JavaScript, but we now have trivial JavaScript debugging support. Oh sure, we had JavaScript debugging support in Visual Studio in previous versions, but have you ever tried it? In prior versions, you would launch your app in the browser, attach the Visual Studio debugger to the browser process, Visual Studio would list the documents that are loaded in the browser, you’d have to hunt down your code and set your breakpoints. In VS2008, just set your breakpoint in the JavaScript code, hit F5, and go. Nice!

Visual Studio also has built-in support for building your WPF, WCF, WF and ASP.NET Ajax, Office-based applications.

.NET 3.5 brings the introduction of the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to the framework. Now there is a common syntax for developers to master that allows them to work with their various data sources. Whether those sources are derived from data pulled down from a database, loaded from an XML file or built as object structures within their application, the syntax is common across all uses. ScottGu has a series of blog posts covering the various aspects of LINQ and serves as a great ramp-up on understanding the technology.

MSDN Subscribers can download all of the juicy bits today as part of their subscription plan. If you’re not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download a 90-day eval copy and take the tools for a spin.If you’re new to Visual Studio or .NET development in general, you might be interested in downloading the free Visual Studio Express tools.

I’d be interested in hearing from you out there. What is your favorite “Orcas” feature?