Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas, has been in development since before the release of its predecessor, Visual Studio 2005. The new version is aimed at, and has been developed alongside, Windows Vista and the new facilities it provides.
Whether the lack of stable development tools for many of Vista's new features has affected the uptake of Microsoft's new desktop OS is a matter for discussion, but for now if you're interested in exploring what you can achieve with the new tools available, this Beta is probably the best way of doing it.
Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 comes nearly a year after the first Beta (a Community Technology Preview, as Microsoft terms it), and the full official release is still some months away.
Installation & interface
We installed Beta 2 on Windows XP Professional inside a VMWare virtual machine, although Microsoft offers prebuilt Virtual PC images if you're using its own virtualisation system. Along with Beta 2 itself you have the option of installing SQL Server 2005 Express to allow development of database-backed applications. Also installed is a beta of the .NET Framework 3.5, but you can still write for versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the framework from within VS 2008. When you create a project, the dialogue box gives you a choice of which version of the framework you want to target, and filters the list of project types accordingly.
At first glance there's virtually no difference in the user interface between VS 2005 and VS 2008. The basic layout is the same and most of the menu options are similar. However, in there is perhaps the single greatest advance in the new version of the IDE. Tucked away to the right of the main menu bar is a new 'Test' item. Testing — both Unit and Ordered testing — is now integrated into Visual Studio, complete with Wizards to help you create sets of tests for your libraries and applications. Although add-on Unit Testing facilities have been available from both Microsoft and third parties for some time, their integration into Visual Studio makes such facilities easier to use, although possibly at the cost of some portability between development environments.
Testing, Office tools, LINQ
Microsoft intends to implement many different test types, including load testing and manual testing, into VS 2008, but only Unit Testing and Ordered Testing — a number of tests executed in a specific order — have been implemented in Beta 2. To use the test facilities, you create a Test project, either directly or through the New Test wizard. Test Projects are language-specific, so if you've written .NET components in both VB and C#, you'll need to test each part separately, although the test projects can be part of the same Solution in VS 2008.
Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is now integrated into Visual Studio, rather than being a separate add-on as it was before. Both Office 2003 and 2007 are supported, although to write an add-on for the latter you'll need to target the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta. You'll also need the relevant versions of Office installed, unsurprisingly.
The Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feature that's been talked about for some time is now supported in VS 2008. LINQ allows you to extract data from heterogeneous sources, such as SQL databases or XML files, using a consistent syntax. As well as the necessary compiler support in VS 2008 there's syntax completion when you're creating queries in LINQ. This gives you a boost in productivity over raw SQL strings, which have to be typed out longhand in Visual Studio, but not necessarily over other data access methods such as ADO.
Working with WPF
You can build applications for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), previously known as Avalon, by creating a WPF Application project, available for .NET 3.0 or higher. This does mean you can develop and test WPF applications on Windows XP, although you won't be able to see the more advanced visual effects possible in Windows Vista, even if you can still write the code for them.
Start a WPF project and VS 2008 creates the main application document, a first window document and code-behind C# or VB.NET documents for both. The idea behind XAML-based user interface creation is that a designer can edit the XML that defines the UI separately from the code, either in Visual Studio or using the Expression graphics tool. If you choose to use VS, the XAML Designer is where user interfaces for WPF are built. It shows you a preview of your window design that updates as you enter code, or you can build user interfaces visually. In contrast with the designers used for Visual Basic and C# user interfaces, you see both the preview and the XAML code on the same page, rather than on separate tabs. The preview pane also features a Zoom slider, allowing you to see more of your form in the screen space available, or you can collapse either pane and see just the design or code.
We found that hand-coding XML to create the UI was generally faster than trying to place elements using the visual builder — as you'd expect, there's code completion available for XAML markup, and you generally have to edit the markup of items you've placed visually anyway.
Not ready for prime-time
Although we encountered virtually no stability problems — as opposed to incomplete features — with Beta 2 of VS2008, we still don't recommend using it for production unless you're desperate to start targeting the native features of Windows Vista. The built-in Unit Testing is a great step forward and will probably be a compelling reason to upgrade once the rest of the test facilities are implemented. However, this is probably the only feature at present in VS 2008 that would be of interest to developers still working in native Win32 code. The Office and Windows Vista development features are great if you're targeting those platforms, but in themselves don't represent an advance in developer productivity.
