Friday, July 27, 2007

Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 released

In what is surely the last step before Visual Studio 2008 (no longer VS "Orcas") gets official, Scott Guthrie announced the release of Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 yesterday. In addition to the IDE update, Scott also announced the release of .NET 3.5 beta 2 and a beta version of VS 2008 Express. Both of these updates bring a lot of new features to the table- from a WPF designer in Visual Studio to a new ListItem data control in ASP.NET- so they're definitely worth downloading and taking for a spin if you've been using beta 1. Plus, the new release also ships with a "Go Live" license, which means you can "officially" use VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 to build and release production applications.

I have been using VS 2008 beta 1 full time for months, and I think this IDE is a major step above VS 2005. If nothing else, the new Split View and integrated unit testing features (now not exclusive to VSTS) make it worth the upgrade. And as I've chronicled in the past, the RadControls already work very well in the new VS.

Based on the the timing of this release, I expect we may see the official VS 2008 ship as early as September (which, for those that are watching, is right around the Telerik Q2 release). Expect Telerik to fully support VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 when they ship. For now, download the free bits and have fun with the new IDE.

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