Visual Studio 2008 RTM - First impressions

I haven’t done heaps with 2008 since installing it yesterday.

I did investigate opening one of our existing projects to see if I could create a 2008 solution, while leaving the 2005 solution intact so that other people could still use 2005 to work on the code. I’d read that this is possible.

I struck a problem though - it looks like this strategy doesn’t work for web applications projects.

The upgrade wizard modifies the path in the project file to where the web application project msbuild stuff gets included from. This would obviously not work for other team members who didn’t also have 2008 installed on their machines.

So it looks like the best plan is to make sure everyone on the team starts using 2008 at the same time.

I also need to confirm that all our various addins and dependencies also continue to work - things like PageMethods and ActiveWriter are good examples.

It is nice to have the IDE start without requiring it to run in Admin mode on Vista though.

.NET Framework Service Packs

Coinciding with the release of Visual Studio 2008, there are new service packs out for .NET 2.0 and 3.0.

• .NET Framework 3.0 SP1
• .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 (x86)

If you’ve installed .NET Framework 3.5, these service packs are already included.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

As predicted in the media, they have shipped.

I’ve managed to get online access to our MSDN Subscription, and am madly downloading bits right now.

Now we can start using all that nice LINQ stuff in VB, not to mention the XML support too - hooray.