Microsoft VS2008 Launch with Andrew Coates
Not a book review but Trevor Doddrell was kind enough to write a roundup of last week's VS2008 launch given by Andrew Coates:
Earlier this week Andrew Coates at Microsoft presented VS2008 to its
Gold Partners which was quite popular with a full room of budding .Net
coders - drawn by the smell of fresh muffins no doubt. VS2008
coincides with the release of the new 3.5 version of the .Net
framework and can sit side by side with VS2005 - but it can also be
used to develop .Net 2.0 code as the framework can be targeted at any
version of the framework from 2.0 up.
Some cool new UX features include a new WPF designer, some WPF
controls and a designer for working with the office 2007 ribbon. On
the web dev side, Ajax is now a part of the framework, the designer
supports nested masterpages and finally there is a split code/html
view.
LINQ is now out of beta and it should be a great technology to query
data in a standard fashion, independent of their formats or sources.
Even if you don't intend on developing in .Net 3.5 just yet, VS2008
comes well recommended from Brian Madsen and other developers who find
it more stable than VS2005.
Many thanks to Microsoft for putting on the presentation and Andrew
Coates for giving it. Andrew's slides can be found online here:
http://candrew.members.winisp.net/files/Visual Studio 2008 Overview (Core) - Copy.pptx