Visual Studio 2008 has gone RTM - free Express downloads, too

[mwb1100]

Visual Studio 2008 has gone to RTM.  The downloads for the free Express versions are available:

http://www.microsoft.com/express

Unfortunately, I could not find a list of what's new & improved.

[justice]

Ah crap and we just bought books for ASP .NET 2.0 lol.

Visual Studio 2008 is targeting .NET 3.5 but for the first time also supports the previous .nets which means the studio updates can occur and be used independently of the .NET version if they continue this trend. Not sure what else is new.

[Lashiec]

Maybe this would help? It's for the full Visual Studio, but I understand it can be extensible to the Express editions. So far, the only feature everyone was talking about was this multitargeting thing, for building applications with support for the various .NET runtimes versions. Damn, justice beat me to it

Looks pretty good. Should I change to this for C++ development now that I have enough disk space for it? . Oh man, not another .NET version... updating time again <_<

[dhuser]

I using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition Beta. It now offers better CSS handling and a new split page view (code/design), like Dreamweaver. Recommended if you want a free Dreamweaver alternative, as it is a great attempt by Microsoft. It can edit ASP, HTML, JS, CSS, and many more files.

dhuser

[Lashiec]

WAIT, WHAT? They offer a free HTML editor as well? OH MY! I wasn't aware of that, does it produce compliant code?

Though I'd have to continue using KompoZer anyway

[CWuestefeld]

IMHO, there are two big improvements in the VS product.

First is its ability to target any version of .Net from 2 on up. This means that I can decide when to upgrade my tools independently of when I upgrade the platform. This is important for me, because we're having huge problems with the stability of VS2005 on 64bit platforms. I can't wait to upgrade the IDE (the new one can't be any worse), but I won't need to upgrade the platform (and thus install .Net 3.5 on my users' machines).

Second is the support for LINQ (and closures, anonymous types, and all the other things that it implies) in C#. Note that this is an enhancement to the compiler itself, and the generated code will work all the way back to .Net2.

[Renegade]

I haven't installed Orcas yet as I've been waiting for VS2008 to go RTM.

But I've never had problems with VS2005 on Vista 64... Make sure that if you're consuming any 32 bit DLLs that you have your project set to x86! That took me a while to figure out as there was no clue in the error messages - things just failed. Once you've got the project set for x86, things start working as expected again.

[CWuestefeld]

But I've never had problems with VS2005 on Vista 64... Make sure that if you're consuming any 32 bit DLLs that you have your project set to x86!

I wasn't clear enough. It's not that the code produced by my project fails, it's that the VS.Net 2005 IDE itself crashes. This happens most often when I have SQL Server Management Studio running.

For example, I can have VS open and minimize it. Then open SSMS and perform some queries, etc. Within about 5 minutes VS is almost guaranteed to have crashed even though I haven't been "touching" it at all.

I've found some things that decrease the incidence of crashes. For example, turning off the Server Explorer seems to help.

[f0dder]

Afaik they've made optimizer improvements (as always ), as well as fixing some obscure C++ bugs that should only really bite you if you're writing insane code.

Looking forward, though.

[CWuestefeld]

<sigh> It's just been brought to my attention that LINQ to SQL only has partial support for SQL Server CE. That is, the designer environment doesn't work.

Also, as far as I've been able to discover, the IronPython language is still not integrated. You've got to get the stupid VS.Net add-in SDK to build for yourself the integration components.

[MrCrispy]

LINQ and C# 3.0 are huge. I've been playing with it for a long time and have still barely scratched the surface. As for the IDE I hope they've fixed the various bugs in VS 2005 which caused all kinds of slowdowns.

Does Orcas have a XAML design surface and proper support? I hope that enough people start using it soon.