Visual Studio 2008 to Ship By End of November

Published: November 7, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Windows developers received post-Halloween treats this week when Microsoft announced that the next releases of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will be available by the end of the month. Microsoft also announced a community technology preview (CTP) of Microsoft Sync Framework, which the company boasts will enable any applications to share data over any protocol, and the opening up of Visual Studio to support non-Windows platforms.

The long-awaited release of Visual Studio 2008 will finally give developers all the tools they need to take full advantage of Windows Vista and Office 2007, namely full support for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the graphical subsystem in the .NET Framework that enables, among other things, the three-dimensional interfaces supported by Windows Vista; and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), the communication subsystem in .NET for developing Web services interfaces.

Microsoft first started delivering WPF and WCF (which, collectively, Microsoft used to refer to as WinFX) nearly two years ago. But it won't be until developers finally get their hands on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework that they'll be able to make full use of the powerful new graphics capabilities available with Windows Vista.

S "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, said during his keynote at a TechEd event in Spain on Sunday that Microsoft plans to release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007. "Organizations have been hard pressed to deliver the richer, more connected applications and services they need," he says. "With Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, it is easy for developers to use the skills they already have to build compelling applications that take advantage of the latest platforms."

There are goodies for developers of all stripes in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. In addition to WPF and WCF support, Visual Studio 2008 enables developers to write applications that plug in to the all-popular Office suite, so-called "Office Business Applications," and also brings support for Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) language, which allows Visual Basic and Visual C# developers to use their SQL skills for accessing data. Web developers also gain new tricks, specifically full support for Web 2.0 AJAX programming, and even the lowly mobile programmer gets support for WCF and LINQ, among other new features.

Various versions of Visual Studio will be available, including Visual Studio Standard Edition, Visual Studio Professional Edition, Visual Studio Express Edition, and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite.

Somasegar also announced the first CTP for Microsoft Sync Framework is now available for download. The Sync Framework works with Visual Studio 2008 to allow developers to build data synchronization capabilities directly into their applications. The company says the technology will allow offline and peer-to-peer collaboration using any protocol for any data type, and any data store.

Microsoft also announced that it will be changing its licensing with Visual Studio 2008 to allow its partners to "provide better support for interoperability with other developer tools and cross-platform scenarios." That means that partners will no longer be limited to writing applications in Visual Studio that only run on Windows or other Microsoft platforms.

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