Visual Studio 2008 stack

Mon, June 4, 2007, 07:02 AM under Orcas | VisualStudio
When Visual Studio 2008 (formerly Visual Studio codename "Orcas") ships in FY08, we will also get other elements of the stack. Below is the opening slide I use at Orcas events:

The main points are that the CLR engine is the same version (so no need to retest your apps) and that the headline feature is the language enhancements (C#3 & VB9 compilers) and LINQ.

The VS2008 IDE is not as big a jump as it was when going from VS.NET2003 to VS2005 and it includes all of today's SDKs out of the box and also a simple yet sweet feature: multitargeting inc. the ability to use new language features from .NET 2.0 projects. FYI, I usually do a demo of new IDE features that lasts 15 minutes (inc. aesthetics, VB intellisense, embedding manifests and new Office templates). Given that VS2008 is a superset of VS2005, there is little point in having both of them installed on the same machine, but it is possible – we support side-by-side at the IDE level.

So that is the IDE, languages and CLR in a nutshell. How about .NET Framework v3.5? For that you'll have to see my blog post tomorrow.