Visual Studio 2008 Is Nearly Here
Scott Guthrie, general manager of the Developer Division at Microsoft, has
been telling us for months that Visual Studio 2008 would arrive in November
of this year. And you know what? I didn't really believe him.
After all, VS08 is a huge upgrade for Redmond's flagship IDE. For the first
time, rank and file developers are actually going to get a chance to work with
all the neat and shiny stuff we've been reporting on for the past year. Stuff
like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the underlying Extensible Application
Markup Language (XAML) for expressing application UIs and Language Integrated
Query (LINQ) for querying data stores from directly within C# or Visual Basic.
So color me impressed that Microsoft is lined
up to make deadline, despite some bumps along the way.
As Gartner analyst Mark Driver noted to me the other day, the emergence of
AJAX as an absolute must-have capability really scrambled Microsoft's plans.
"AJAX completely caught them by surprise. Their plans for a next-generation
UI did not involve AJAX at all. They had WPF as a next-generation declarative
UI," said Driver, who added: "I think Silverlight may end up being
the saving grace for WPF as it matures."
Yes, Silverlight development is supported in VS08 as well, though it remains
incomplete as the dev-centric Silverlight 1.1 product remains in an open-ended
alpha state for the time being. But what Silverlight will do is hook an energetic
nation of Web developers to XAML -- the same XAML that is at the heart of WPF-powered
UIs. Can you feel the leverage?
For people who've been patiently waiting for a reason to get excited about
all the framework and foundation work being done at Redmond, it's time. With
VS08 finally coming to market, dev shops can get to work crafting the next generation
of Windows, .NET and Web applications.
Are you going to jump on Visual Studio 2008? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com,
and let me know your thoughts about VS08 and whether you plan to move to your
apps to WPF.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/2007