News

VS 2008 Ready this Month

Microsoft set to unveil Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5.

• By Kathleen Richards
• 11/15/2007

Microsoft is giving developers an early holiday gift. It plans to release Visual Studio 2008 -- and the .NET Framework 3.5 -- to manufacturing this month, meeting the most optimistic forecasts for when the long-anticipated upgrade to its flagship IDE would ship.

With its release, Microsoft's Visual Studio is finally catching up to the .NET platform -- somewhat -- offering tooling for .NET Framework 3.0 (available since November 2006) and .NET Framework 3.5.

New Tooling
Microsoft is posting the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 on MSDN for download by subscribers later this month. The Visual Studio 2008 release will include the entire range of tools from Visual Studio Standard and Professional Editions to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2008 Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Suite modules to Visual Studio 2008 Express editions. Visual Studio 2008 tooling is expected to be available off-the-shelf early next year.

"We've always actually been driving toward a November ship date," says Scott Guthrie, GM of Microsoft's development division. "That's actually been in the schedule for at least nine or 10 months."

The new IDE adds or integrates tooling for the foundations in Windows Vista (.NET 3.0), Office 2007, ASP.NET AJAX, Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and the Web. TFS and VSTS also offer a host of new features including continuous integration, support for larger teams and performance improvements. .NET 3.5 integrates ASP.NET AJAX, LINQ, and support for Web 2.0 protocols -- WS*, REST, JSON, RSS and ATOM APIs.

"The whole idea of Web 2.0 is broader than just composing user interfaces, it's more about composing application functionality," says Dino Chiesa, director of .NET platform in the connected systems division at Microsoft. "Things like making the Web programmable and building apps that exploit that programmability and that's how we're evolving .NET 3.5 to exploit that type of capability."

LINQ debuts in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. It allows developers to query relational, XML or .NET object data from within VB or C#.

The worldwide launch for Visual Studio 2008 is still scheduled for Feb. 27, 2008, along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

"We're planning a VS2008 kind of patch upgrade so that when the final SQL Server 2008 does ship, we'll make sure that everything fully works with it. Because it's still under development, there are some features there that aren't finalized," says Guthrie. "If you use the SQL Server 2005 feature set, obviously that all works."

Up-to-Date Extensions
The final release of VS2008 will be followed in the same week by updates to several VS extensions, says Guthrie.

Microsoft is releasing a new beta of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entity tooling, which were dropped from Visual Studio 2008 shortly after the first beta was released. The Entity Framework is expected to ship early next year, and once that happens, it will be made available in the service packs for VS2008 and .NET 3.5.

The company is also shipping a VS2008 update to the Silverlight tools for beta 2 add-in. "The update that we ship this month will just have the same features," explains Guthrie. "And then you'll see the next major update of the Silverlight tooling support add all the new runtime tooling support, data binding, layout management, styling templates -- a bunch of exciting features." That tooling will be in beta until Silverlight 1.1 is released, which is expected next year, although Guthrie declined to comment on a release date.

As Visual Studio 2008 tooling releases to manufacturing and becomes broadly available, some observers expect to see more dev activity related to .NET 3.0 and emerging technologies. "WPF and Silverlight overall really haven't taken off," says Gartner Inc. analyst Mark Driver. "I see a lot of early interest and a lot of experimenting going on. But until we see VS08 come out with solid tooling, we're not going to see WPF take off with significant volumes."

Guthrie defends Microsoft's progress. "WPF is now six or seven months old," Guthrie says. "VS2008 is the first version that has support for WPF tooling in it. It will ship designer and project system support for it. Certainly we expect to see even more uptake once that happens." Microsoft is seeing a lot of uptake with global ISVs and people building "rich" line-of-business apps, he says.

With .NET 4.0 on the horizon, the multi-targeting features in Visual Studio 2008 -- it can be used with .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 -- are freeing Microsoft from tying the framework to the tooling. "From an adoption standpoint, we are trying to be very cognizant of our customers' desires not to have to keep upgrading their tools every year, and have a more regular cadence there," says Guthrie. "But at the same time we can ship features that people want, but have developers know that they have the safety mechanisms to upgrade when they want to as opposed to when the new tool set comes out."

Visual Studio 2008 licensing will basically follow the same structure as VS2005. Licensing and the SKUs are the same with only "cosmetic" changes. (However, unit testing is now available in VS2008 Professional; in VS2005, it was only in the VSTS Test Edition.)