Well there has been a bit of a change at Microsoft with the focus and methodologies used to to build Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 according to the information I have received and read.  The focus was getting the product to be "Feature-Complete". Allowing for more usable and stable release.

Page 2 of the of this EWeek Article outlines some interesting comments and information about this focus. I have placed a summary below. But I recommend you read the article if you have a spare 5 minutes.

Some of the new Feature-Complete features include:

• LINQ (Language Integrated Query) support
• WPF Designer (Cider visual designer)
• Tool support for Office 2007

There is also a statement within the article that Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is "... pretty much what you're going to see with the final version".

Each of the features within Visual Studio 2008 was allocated to a feature team which included a "handful of developers, a handful of testers and a couple of program managers".

So those teams focused on the features primarily and submitted that feature(s) when they were completed.  - Certainly makes you think whether you could be developing your software this way? Interesting.

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen.

Well if you haven't heard, Visual Studio 2008 supports Multi-targeting with .NET Frameworks 2.0, 3.0, 3.5.

• .NET Framework 2.0 - Included with Visual Studio 2005
• .NET Framework 3.0 - Included as part of Vista & Windows Server 2008 (includes .NET Framework 2.0), or as separate download
• .NET Framework 3.5 - Included with Visual Studio 2008

What does this mean for me?

Well this means you can build applications targeted for a specific framework  listed above with the one Visual Studio tool/IDE. This excludes .NET Framework 1.1 and below - sorry it looks like it was a mission to go back that far!

One thing I have noticed when opening solutions created in Visual Studio 2005 with .NET 2.0, that I was prompted when opening in VS 2008 to upgrade the solution to VS 2008.  But again you can set the target to .NET Framework 2.0.

Also if you are a .NET developer you really don't want to have multiple copies of Visual Studio on your machine (or Virtual Machine) - can't we just have one? Well you now can if you develop from .NET Framework 2.0 and above.  Its still ok to have Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2008 installed side-by-side. But once you move to .NET 2.0 you can ditch Visual Studio 2003 off your machine - unless you still need to support older applications. If you have only just begun with .NET 1.1 then I suggest you probably should upgrade to at least .NET 2.0 so you can keep moving along.

So the great advantage I see with Multi-targeting with Visual Studio 2008 is that you can move directly to Visual Studio 2008 and continue working on your .NET 2.0 applications but now with the new IDE - now that's cool!

Multi-targeting is limited though within the Express versions of Visual Studio.  I have been told that you do not get the dropdownlist of .NET Frameworks within the New Project Dialog Menu. So remember this.

Here is a snapshot of the New Project Dialog Menu showing the different targeted frameworks ......

(Image Size: 600x461)

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen

Well a few days ago I installed Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 on my home Vista (Ultimate) machine and i'm liking it!

Nice easy install, around 1.2GB after deselecting the options which I didn't need.  I must say VS 2008 seems to be a lot more stable once installed on Vista than VS 2005 on Vista so i'm pretty happy.

There is quite a few new things with Visual Studio 2008 which I couldn't possibly cover with this one post. So for now I will just show the nice install logos and post the cool stuff as I work thought it all.  Shouldn't take me to long, i.e. posting stuff within the next few days.

First lot of postings will include things like the namespaces added to every new Web page, publishing Web sites, targeting .net frameworks, new designer tools etc etc the list goes on ... stay tuned!

Original Setup Screen - not much changed here ...

Now some nice blue images captured from the install process ...

I'm liking this blue ... :-)

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen

The latest version of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is the Ribbon Designer.  The Ribbon Designer makes it easy to customize the Ribbon in your Office applications.  In VSTO 2005 SE, you could add a Ribbon Item to your project but most of the work was done manually via XML.

In VSTO "Orcas" (Beta 2 is the current latest version) there is a designer that lets you customize the Ribbon in the same way you'd customize a Windows Form. This means you can simply drag and drop controls from the Visual Studio toolbox onto the designer. You can then set properties of the controls, and write code in the event handler of the control. Now this is cool !

I will have to have a play with this stuff in more detail in the next few weeks.  In the mean time if you are interested then you probably should get a hold of the tools and give it a go.  I'm currently using DevExpress ( http://www.devexpress.com ) XtraBars Ribbon Control within a Windows Application at the moment but it will be good to see how they both compare.

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen

Well yesterday I started another Visual Studio 2005 project.  I created the project and all looked good. I then noticed my Solution (.sln) was not showing in the Solution Explorer with Visual Studio 2005.  I remember I had this issue before and needed to remember how I enabled this in the view.

So after hunting around in the Options section from the File menu I found it.

Before:

After:

How to enable:

If you want to always show the solution in the solution explorer, do the following:
Select, Tools > Options menu item. Then Projects and Solutions > General in the options hierarchy.
Finally, check the Always Show Solution checkbox.

Hope this helps!

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen