TechEd 2007 - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5

A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5

Daniel Moth

Visual Studio 2008 was shown as a superset of Visual Studio 2005. It supports multi-targeting (as a told in last blog entry), it has a nice helper: removing unused imports :-P, allows nested master-pages in design-view and can be used as an IDE for different variations of javascript (IE specific, standard, Firefox, etc). It has a CSS manager with preview, and by default all appearance settings as fonts and colors are stored in CSS classes and not in-line.

In Visual Studio 2008, unit testing tools will be available in Professional Edition and not only in Enterprise, like in VS 2005.

Daniel made a demo which interested me a lot! Developing add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007. VS 2008 has a visual tool for Ribbon design, for example. A new feature of both C# and VB9 is the local type inference. This means that you don’t have to declare a type for a variable, because the compiler will analyze the code and set it into the correct type. You can declare a variable, assign an integer value (having intellisense for integer variables) and then assign a string (having intellisense for string values from that line on).

There is some syntactic sugar for C# as in-line functions (for example to assign a delegate without declaring a function), object initializers (when creating an object declare the default values for public properties). These features are compatible with .NET Framework 2.0, because the compiler creates the suitable IL definition.