Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Getting started with Visual Studio 2008

The news first appeared on the blog of Scott Guttrie and later swarmed out across the blogosphere ... But how do you start because there are a a lot of new things out there - luckily there exists the Visual Studio 2008 RTM Training Kit which will get you started.

The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit has been updated for the RTM and has been released on the Microsoft.com Download Center for anyone to download and use.

The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit contains a full 5-days of technical content including 20hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos.   The technologies covered in the kit include:  LINQ, C# 3.0, VB 9, WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server. 

Originally developed for early adoption work with ISVs, it is now available to all. 

You can download the entire training kit from the download center here:  http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397.  The kit is just over 120MB compressed.   After downloading the kit, simply run the installation program to extract the contents to your local machine.  Once the installation process is complete, you will see an HTML page that allows you to navigate through the contents of the kit. 

If you don't want to do a complete install immediately - you might want to take a look at one of MSDN Virtual Lab: Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008 . One of the advantages in the new version is the enhanced WPF support - for more info take a look at XAML Editor Preferences in Visual Studio 2008 Part 1 and  Part 2 as well. Here's some info which I picked up from Brad's blog:

1. VS 2008 fully supports multi-targeting... meaning you can use the new tool to work on your existing web applications and VS2005 projects

2. AJAX Development is first class.  The ASP.NET AJAX functionality is built into the framework and the IDE fully support JavaScript debugging and JavaScript Intellisense . There also exists an updated version of the AJAX Control Toolkit for Visual Studio 2008.

3. Linq, Linq and Linq...  Data access gets way easier with the LINQ support in VS 2008, C#, VB and the platform.   

4. Visual design experience in VS for building WPF based applications

5. Debug into the .NET Framework source code

For a full feature list of Visual Studio 2008 take a look at Jeff's blog  and I also recommend that you take a look at Top 10 things you should know about Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5  as well as Hidden gems in Visual Basic 2008. There is also a complete poster with the .NET Framework 3.5 commonly used types and namespaces.

With all the buzz surrounding the release of Visual Studio 2008, you might have missed these releases:

  • Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework 2.0 SP1 - Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 provides cumulative roll-up updates for customer reported issues found after the release of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. In addition, this release provides security improvements, and prerequisite feature support for .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1, and .NET Framework 3.5.
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 - Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 provides cumulative roll-up updates for customer reported issues found after the release of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. In addition, this release provides security improvements, and prerequisite feature support for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (version 3.0 runtime)  - This download (VSTOR30.exe) installs the Visual Studio Tools for the Office system 3.0 Runtime, which is required to run VSTO solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

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