November | 2007 | An Original Idea

A little while ago Microsoft announced via the MSDN news feed (first time I actually found the “Start” page useful). So it’s time for you MSDN subscribers to start your download managers.

What’s New?

Visual Studio 2008 finally provides a fully supported developer experience for the .Net 3.0 technologies, namely Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation.

It also supports the hyped up LINQ feature, which will be implemented in tandem with the .NET 3.5 runtime which is being released at the same time.

An interesting feature is the ability to target .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 applications. It’s different to previous attempts in that some language features will work across all versions of the .NET Framework.

Compact Framework

Unit Testing is now available “out of the box” along with the Compact Framework 3.5.

The Compact Framework 3.5 includes LINQ and an implementation of WCF that uses Exchange ActiveSync as a transport. Nice, but not anything I’m particularly interested in.

Silverlight

Scot Guthrie says “Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release, These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio. Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks.”

I’ll be looking forward to that!