Monday, August 27, 2007 10:40 PM
I've been working with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for a few months now, and I'm really excited about the changes coming. The WCF support is so much better with auto-generated service stubs, a built-in test client, and direct right-click access to the WCF Configuration Editor from Solution Explorer. Add Web Reference actually creates WCF clients now with lots of great control.
LINQ is everywhere. The namespace is auto-imported for easy access, there's a LINQ Data Classes class template (DBML file). Working with data whether from a database, XML, or object collections is just so much cooler than ever (yes, I said that data can be cool!).
Visual Studio lets you choose a target runtime! I absolutely love that. If VS 2003 had let users build 1.0 apps, and VS 2005 had let users build 1.1 apps, there would have been a lot more happy campers out there! That and VB Classic... :-)
If you haven't had a chance yet, download the beta. It's a worth successor to VS 2005.