What's new in Visual Studio 2008?

With all the hype going on around the recent release of Visual Studio 2008 & the area install-fests taking place, you might be wondering, "Just what exactly is new in there?"  After getting home from the Central Jersey .NET user group last night where Walt Ritscher gave a great session on WPF, I decided to check out his blog and give it a spin.   Walt had a great post from a couple of weeks ago that lists out some of the key new features.  Instead of re-typing it all myself, I'll give you a snippet, then you can link over there to read the rest...

Web Improvements

Scott Guthrie usually has detailed posts regarding the ASP.NET/AJAX tools.  Rick Strahl give his opinion about 2008, the install process, and C# 3.0 features.

Web programmers get JavaScript debugging, nested master pages, a new HTML designer, a usable CSS editor.  There is also a couple new controls too (LinqDataSource, DataPager, ListView).

Tools and Testing

I heard from Doug Seven that Jeff Beehler has a ton of links describing some of these new Visual Studio Team System additions. Doug’s right.

Language enhancements

VB programmers get a lot of new Intellisense enhancements.

You gotta love the new VB9 and C# 3.0 language features.

• Lambdas
• Automatic properties
• Relaxed delegates
• Object initializers
• Anonymous types
• Type inference
• Extension methods

LINQ, LINQ, LINQ

There’s a river of  love pouring out of the .Net developer community for the new LINQ query syntax.  Not everybody likes it, of course, but overall LINQ seems to a very nice way to query information in your applications.

Read the rest of this post over at Walt's blog...