Subtitles of the Movie

Let's take a look at some of the new features in Visual Studio 2008. These aren't in any particular order and there are a lot more of them, but I just want to kind of hit the high points. First of all, Microsoft continues to develop capabilities on the web side of things. There's a new Data Repeater Control in here that's really cool. It's got a whole lot more flexibility than the standard grid controls. This one just helps you organize your data in a scrollable container a whole lot better, and so anyway you can go out to the website, take a look at some of that, about the new Data Grid Controls. This is huge for me. I don't know how big a deal it is for you, but Line and Shape Controls. If you remember back in the old VB days you could just draw lines on your Forms and draw boxes and stuff to do some sort of kind of graphical work, and these are back now in Visual Studio 2008, and some of these, by the way, come through Service Pack 1, and so that kind of goes without saying. Once you see the Service Pack out there grab it and put it on. So, if you're running Visual Studio 2008 and Service Pack 1 you'll see these things. So, anyway you've got Line and Shape Controls. Improved Click Once Deployment Ð now if you know what Click Once Deployment is, it's a way that we can actually build an application, put it out there on a web server and people will hit it, they'll click it, it'll pull it down to their machine, install it, install the application, it's really cool. There are some enhancements to this whole idea of this Click Once Deployment. They've changed some of the publishing options and the dialog boxes, but anyway, you'll like what you see there if you're a fan of Click Once Deployment. They've added some stuff to make your life a little better there. Settings Migration Ð this is a big one. If you've got Visual Studio 2005 on your machine and you install 2008 on the same machine you can pull any settings that you have in 2005 and just migrate them over into 2008 so that when you open 2008 you'll have all the settings and stuff that you've done in 2005 right there, so it's not like you're starting over from scratch. There's a Class Designer now for the C++ folks; they didn't have that before. That's really cool. Windows Presentation Foundation Designer, now, back at Visual Studio 2005 there was a lot of buzz in marketing out there about the new Windows Presentation Foundation, but it just wasn't very friendly to work with inside Visual Studio and they've improved that a lot in this release. There's a new Design View that you're going to like and especially when you're dealing with HTML because it's a new version of kind of what you see is what you get, but you can split the window and see the HTML code and then the resultant web page at the time, and you can make changes. They've also significantly beefed up the CSS or Cascading Style Sheets design tools to help you there on the design side, and that's obviously a big deal Ð a lot of help Ð you'll like those. They've also included now IntelliSense, so if you're writing J Script Code and Ajax, and that's huge. You have IntelliSense support for Ajax now, and IntelliSense, of course, are those little boxes that drop down to help you complete your code and all that stuff. You'll see it later if you don't know what it is. Language Integrated Query support's now included in the development environment. This is Link. If you don't know what Link is we'll be looking at it later. Link's a really cool technology. There are a number of reporting improvements to help us with the way reports are pulled. There are some tricks with PDF Encoding and Compression, and all kinds of things. So, again, a lot of cool stuff going on in Visual Studio. Really it depends on what kind of developer you are and exactly what you're doing with Visual Studio as to how big a deal you see some of these new improvements, but trust me there's a lot going on and I would again refer you out to Microsoft's website to get even more detail on what's happening new in Visual Studio 2008. But you're going to like it. If you've been 05 you're really going to like what you see here.