Visual Studio 2008 Overview

Visual Studio 2008

Overview

By Roman Okolovich

Overview What is Visual Studio? The Microsoft

Visual Studio development system is a suite of development tools designed to aid software developers — whether they are novices or seasoned professionals — face complex challenges and create innovative solutions. Visual Studio's role is to improve the process of development and make the work of achieving breakthroughs easier and more satisfying.

―An Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 White Paper‖ – see attached document on right side

Visual Studio Editions Visual Studio Express Edition

Visual Basic 2008 Express with SP1, Visual C# 2008 Express with SP1, Visual C++ 2008 Express with SP1, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1

SQL Server 2008 Express

SQL Server Compact Edition

They are free

Visual Studio Standard Edition

Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition provides a full-featured development environment for Windows and Web developers. It’s a perfect fit for individual developers.

Visual Studio Professional Edition

Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition was engineered to support development projects that target the Web (including ASP.NET AJAX), Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, The 2007 Microsoft Office system, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Mobile devices.

Visual Studio Team System

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 is an integrated Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance to help everyone on the team improve their skills and work more effectively together. Visual Studio Team System enables members of your team to:

Collaborate and communicate more effectively with other team members and business stakeholders.

Ensure software quality using advanced quality tools at every step of the application life cycle.

Gain visibility into project activity and priorities to make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison

Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Use the Visual Studio SDK to create extensions for the Visual Studio platform

including the Visual Studio 2008 Shell.

Visual Studio Shell Enables developers to rapidly create and distribute their own custom tools by building on

a streamlined Visual Studio IDE; does not include languages and compilers.

The Visual Studio Shell is freely available as part of the Visual Studio SDK. Visual Studio Shell is royalty-free for building and deploying applications.

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is an open-source development tool aimed to bring the Visual Studio experience to building World of Warcraft add-ons.

Visual Studio Tools for Applications Enables ISVs and enterprises to embed a streamlined IDE into their applications,

accelerating customization development by end users, resellers, system integrators, and internal teams. Includes support for Visual Basic and Visual C# along with other tools for application customization.

Visual Studio Tools for Applications must be licensed for redistribution with applications. The VSTA SDK provides one copy of VSTA for evaluation, development, and test purposes only.

Microsoft offers licensees per-seat and royalty-based licensing options.

Home Page

Visual Studio Gallery: Products & Extensions for Visual Studio

Learn Visual Studio Extensibility

Visual Studio Service Pack 1 Improved WPF designers

SQL Server 2008 support

ADO.NET Entity Designer

Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)

This update to the MFC library enables developers to build modern user interfaces with support for the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar, Office-style menus, Visual Studio-style docking toolbars, tabbed documents and much more. All of the components included in the update will run on Windows 2000 and above.

BCGSoft Co Ltd announced that Microsoft Corporation has integrated BCGControlBar Professional Edition technology in the next version of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) library.

Ribbons

Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008

Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 release notes and a list of fixed issues

Visual C++ 2008 Poster

Link: Visual C++ 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster

CodePlex

CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web

site. Start a new project, join an existing one, or

download software created by the community.

Microsoft does not control, review, revise, endorse or

distribute the third party projects on this site. Microsoft is

hosting the CodePlex site solely as a web storage site

as a service to the developer community.

More About CodePlex...

CodePlex Homepage

"How Do I" Videos On this page you will find dozens of videos designed for all Visual Studio

Developers, from the novice to the professional, to highlight some of the great new features available in Visual Studio 2008 to help you and your organization experience productivity breakthroughs, create outstanding user experiences, and collaborate across the development life-cycle.

How Do I: Create and Modify a Cascading Style Sheet in Visual Studio 2008?

How Do I: Use JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2008?

How Do I: Learn About the Integrated Development Environment in Visual Studio 2008?

How Do I: Create a Rich Client Application with MFC?

How Do I: Read and Write Selected Text from a Visual Studio 2008 Source Code Window?

etc…

"How Do I?" Videos for Team System

Channel 9 Channel 9 is all about the conversation. Channel 9 should inspire

Microsoft and our customers to talk in an honest and human voice.

Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead generation

tool.

Be a human being. Channel 9 is a place for us to be ourselves, to share

who we are, and for us to learn who our customers are.

Marketing has no place on Channel 9. When we spend money on

Channel 9 the goal is to surprise and delight, not to promote or preach.

Lynne Hill: Parallel Computing Platform - The Vision and Future

Cogwheel: Building World of Warcraft Addons

QuakeLight Preview

Expert to Expert: Natural Language and Computational Linguistics

Visual Studio Tip of the Day by Sara Ford Sara Ford is Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) on the Visual Studio Core

team. She have been on the team for 4 years, since joining Microsoft.

When I grow up, I want to be a Test Lead.

Did you know… How to change the default templates that appear in the New Project Dialog? - #342

Did you know… What unchecking the display an explorer window on the Export Templates Wizard does? - #341

Did you know… You can view the build order for the solution? - #334

Did you know… How to change the build order for your solution? - #333

Did you know… You can use the New Project Dialog to add a new project to a solution? - #330

Did you know... You can add $exception to the Watch window to see the caught exception - #318

Did you know... What's the difference between the Autos window and the Locals window? - #316

etc…

Visual Studio Tips: Task List The Task List helps to create and manage a list of programming tasks. In the Task List window, you can do

the following:

Create User Tasks, which are notes about work to be done.

Display Task Comments that link to lines in your code where work must be done.

Display custom Categories of task messages.

Comments in code begin with the comment mark preferred by your development language. If you insert a token string (TODO, UNDONE, HACK, or a custom token string) after the comment mark, a shortcut to the comment will appear in the Task List.

Visual Studio Tips: Bookmarks The Bookmarks window is a handy companion tool to the Code Editor. You can mark lines in your code

files with bookmarks and then organize these bookmarks into virtual folders. This enables you to open files and navigate directly to the lines marked simply by clicking entries in the Bookmarks window.

Bookmark displays the name of the bookmark. Default names are created as Bookmarkn where n is a number. You can create custom bookmark names by right-clicking on the bookmark entry and selecting Rename from the context menu.

Each bookmark has its own check box. To activate an existing bookmark, select its check box in the Bookmarks window. To hide (but not remove) an existing bookmark, clear its check box in the Bookmarks window.

Visual Studio Tips: Error List The Error List helps you speed application development. In the Error List window, you can:

Display the Errors, Warnings, and Messages produced as you edit and compile code.

Find syntax errors noted by IntelliSense.

Find deployment errors, certain Static Analysis errors, and errors detected while applying Enterprise Template policies.

Double-click any error message entry to open the file where the problem occurs, and move to the error location.

Filter which entries are displayed, and which columns of information appear for each entry.

Visual Studio Tips: Tabs Tab size

Sets the distance in spaces between tab stops. The default is four spaces.

Indent size

Sets the size in spaces of an automatic indentation. The default is four spaces. Tab characters, space characters, or both will be inserted to fill the specified size.

Insert spaces

When selected, indent operations insert only space characters, not TAB characters. If the Indent size is set to 5, for example, then five space characters are inserted whenever you press the TAB key or the Increase Indent button on the Formatting toolbar.

Keep tabs

When selected, indent operations insert as many TAB characters as possible. Each TAB character fills the number of spaces specified in Tab size. If the Indent size is not an even multiple of the Tab size, space characters are added to fill in the difference.