Visual Studio 2008

At its TechEd 2007 conference here, Microsoft announced June 4 that the next version of Visual Studio, which has been known by the code name "Orcas," has been dubbed Visual Studio 2008.
In addition, C. Joe Marini, group product manager of developer marketing at Microsoft, said beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 will become available later this summer and will include a new feature known as the Visual Studio Shell. The Visual Studio Shell enables developers to create and distribute their own custom tools built on top of the Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment).
"Partners and developers want a way to build their developer tool products on top of Visual Studio as a starting point so they can use the Visual Studio base technologies and services," Martini said in an interview with eWEEK.
The Visual Studio Shell will operate in two different modes. The first is the Integrated Mode, which is for developers creating programming language integration with Visual Studio, Marini said. The second is known as Isolated Mode and is for Microsoft partners and customers who want to take the base technology of Visual Studio and custom brand it, he said.

Visual Studio 2008 is interesting on several levels. First and I think this is very significant is that it works with .NET 2.0 and you can build applications that run on .NET 2.0. This means it’s possible to take advantage of many of the new features in Visual Studio - especially the new designer and the somewhat improved JavaScript support - even for today’s projects. That makes the new tool very palatable to try and play with immediately. I’ve moved several of my internal applications to Orcas and it’s been a pleasure working in VS 2008.

One of the biggest advantages in VS 2008 is the new HTML editor both for markup and design view. It’s based on the same editor that’s in Microsoft Web Expression (which is a great tool BTW and which I use daily!) and provides a ton of improved functionality and much better rendering. However, the biggest bonus that you’ll notice immediately with the new editor is that it is much, much faster than the VS 2005 editor. You know the feeling in VS 2005 as you open a markup or worse a designer page and you wait and wait and wait some more. With VS 2008 that is no longer the case - activating markup or design view happens in a second or two even for complex pages. Not only that but because there’s split view for design and markup you rarely switch views and because both panes stay in sync the whole experience is much more expressive. The editor and speed alone is a big productivity improvement at least for me.

It’s important to remember that the ASP.NET team has already delivered very important support features prior to the Orcas release cycle. Specifically I’m thinking of ASP.NET AJAX and full support for the IIS 7 integrated pipeline, which in my opinion really counts as the ASP.NET 3.0!

Futures

Then there’s also the ASP.NET Futures features, which at this point are still up in the air. Some of the Futures features have been getting kind of stale like the AJAX features that were originally introduced in the ATLAS days. The advanced libraries like effects, drag and drop, basic control features, databinding and JsonConverters haven’t been updated since ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 was released which is a bummer. I maintain that ASP.NET AJAX’s client library is what amounts to an incomplete product and Microsoft should really finish that part of the framework. The Futures features at least bring the library on par with some much smaller JavaScript libraries. Effects functionality and more high level DOM support are supported by just about all JS libraries to date but the ASP.NET AJAX Client library is very light on any sort of client support. Unfortunately it looks like there won’t be much of a change for the Orcas release .
The Futures release also contains a bunch of new functionality that relates to Silverlight and embedding Silverlight and XAML content into pages. Silverlight is getting all the dibs these days and it’s likely that this stuff will find its way into the new runtimes. There are a few other odds and ends in the Futures release such as Rails like dynamic framework that provides rough scaffolding for a database.

It’s unclear at this point what Futures features will make it into the final runtimes as Microsoft is still working out the details of these items at this time