Bob and Chris Roadshow

IanD — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:56:00 GMT

Today I am at the Bob and Chris Roadshow - they are doing a whirlwind tour thru various topics such as Visual Studio 2008, Multi Tennant Data Architectures, LINQ and more.

Chris Bowen, Microsoft Developer Evangelist for New ENgland just covered some great new features in Visual Studio 2008. He gave a great presentation, that was not just full of useful information, but jokes too. Some of the highlights for me were:

VS2008 is easy to move to since when you create a new project you can target the version of the .Net framework to be used - so you can use the new IDE to build your .Net 2.0 web application. This is a huge benefit and allows for early adoption. A nice touch is that as you pick the version of the framework you want to use, the list of available project types changes.

The feature that got the biggest ahhhh - if you are typing in a code window and the intellisense pops up, you can now hold the Ctrl key down and it fades into the background - nice touch.

For web development - the Expressions web editor has largely been incorporated into the VS2008 IDE. This is a great improvement, you can see CSS being applied, create new styles etc. Also - the IDE now supports nested master pages - finally! There are too many features to list here - but if you have used SharePoint Designer or Expressions Web - you will now be able to get a lot of that functionality in VS2008. However if you are a SharePoint developer, like me, you be disappointed to hear that it cannot connect to a SharePoint site - you will still need to use SP Designer for a lot of things. But you can create SharePoint Workflows in VS2008.

For Windows Application Developers there is a new pair of container controls, formerly codenamed Crossbow, now called WinForms WPF Interop, which allow you to host WPF inside a WinForms application or Win Forms controls inside a WPF application. Why is this good? Well if you have somoe custom Win Form controls that you want to use in a new WPF application - you can now host them and use them. From a Win Forms point of view, you can now get all the cool 3D features, Audio etc from WPF in your application.

Building web services is something I have always been a big fan of, but one of the draw backs was the need to build a test harness to exercise the API endpoints. Now with VS2008 you can define the API and then just hit F5 to run debug - VS2008 looks at the API and dynamically provides a UI to allow you pick the function to call and define parameters to be passed and call your API. This is a big time saver for quick testing. Of course you should also write your unit tests - but thats a topic for another day.

Finally, VS2008 professional now includes Unit Testing - this is in response to user demand. However if you want all thye code analysis and coverage etc you will need Team System.

Great Session, thanks Chris.

Dot Net : WPF

Bob and Chris Roadshow