Tim Almond

This week, I paid a visit to Microsoft’s offices in Reading to get a peek at what’s in Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5.

I’ve been using Visual Studio 2005, and it was quite an improvement over the 2003 version, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

For me, the two big differences are in CSS and Javascript. It has a built-in style management system that allows for styles to be organised, easily updated, moved around, and so forth. For Javascript, you get the same sort of debugging that you normally get for server-side development.

There’s also LINQ, which is designed to give a sort of inline SQL query language that can be applied to XML, databases and objects. I’m not quite sure about this yet.

On top of that - lots of Ajax enhancements and so forth.

No CDs, but there’s a beta available to download from Microsoft.com (a whopping 3GB).

Tags: Software Development, Microsoft //