Monday, 30 July 2007

Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft has released the much-anticipated beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft also unveiled a series of web development tool upgrades including the .NET framework 3.5 Beta 2 and the release candidate of Flash rival, Silverlight 1.0.

Visual Studio 2008 is a tool for web developers that work with an integrated development environment to produce applications or Web services that run on Microsoft's .NET framework. The last major update of Visual Studio was Visual Studio 2005, released in October 2005. The first-ever release of a Visual Studio product was Visual Studio 97. VS 2008 marks the sixth major release of the product line, used by developers to build software for various Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office, Windows Vista, and Web development.

According to Scott Guthrie, general manager of the client, Web platform and tools team at Microsoft, enhancement to VS08 include a more refined JavaScript IntelliSense for reading JavaScript inside an IDE.

While .NET 3.5 will allow developers to use a Language Integrated query (Linq) expression to query any type of data. Developers will also have split view access, which allows them to see the HTML source and the design view at the same time.