DEVELOP SMART CLIENT APPLICATIONS
Studio 2008 adds ClickOnce support for the Firefox browser and provides location-independent signing and customer branding.
By taking advantage of the 2007 Office system as a development platform, designers can leverage the look and feel of both Office and SharePoint to create familiar, intuitive UIs. Developers can then use Visual Studio Tools for Office to produce the UIs in their solutions quickly and easily. Visual Studio 2008 also provides developers with support for building native C++ applications that use the Microsoft Office 2007 UI style, including the Ribbon Bar, Ribbon Status Bar, and Mini-toolbar.
Developers can use the same user profile and login services for their client applications as for their Web applications. This enables customers to use one method of back-end storage for user personalisation and authentication, regardless of the application type.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition—a free, easy-to-use, lightweight, and embeddable version of SQL Server 2005 for developing desktop and mobile applications. SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition, the next version of SQL Server Mobile, extends the SQL Server Mobile technology to the desktop.
Finally, developers using Visual Studio 2008 can leverage service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to build mobile device client applications that work in partially connected environments. These applications can send data to and receive data from a server, even if the device disconnects or roams.
CREATE MICROSOFT OFFICE APPLICATIONS
Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. The tools in Visual Studio enable developers to create both application-level and document-level managed-code customizations behind 2007 Office system applications quickly and easily.
Full support for ClickOnce deployment of all Office customizations and applications gives developers and administrators the right tools and framework for easy deployment and maintenance of their Office solutions.
BUILD WINDOWS VISTA APPLICATIONS
Incorporate new Windows Presentation Foundation features into both existing Windows Forms applications and new applications. They can also move their applications to the new Windows Vista look and feel easily with enhancements to the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) and Visual C++.
A number of the Windows Vista look and feel features are available simply by recompiling an MFC application. Deeper integration that requires more coding or design work is also simplified with Visual Studio’s integrated support for the Windows Vista native APIs.
HANDLE DATA MORE PRODUCTIVELY
Using LINQ, developers can write queries natively in C# or Visual Basic, without needing to use specialized languages such as SQL and XPath.
LINQ to SQL—a run-time infrastructure for managing relational data as objects without losing the ability to query—simplifies the construction of data driven Web sites.
ENABLE NEW WEB EXPERIENCES
Developers can use RAD tools to quickly and easily create client connections and proxies to existing services, and test them without needing to write code. In addition, developers can use the same techniques and tools for consuming WCF services, no matter where they are located.
Build client-centric Web applications that integrate with any back-end data provider, run within any modern browser, and have complete access to ASP.NET application services and the Microsoft platform.
APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT (ALM)
Visual Studio 2008 provides a full suite of tools for source control, test-data generation and testing, rename refactoring, and a deployment solution that includes visual diff/merge and deploy-script generation.
Visual Studio 2008 improves on existing load-testing capabilities as well, by simplifying the load-testing interface and providing a multiple-machine graph view that displays the test results, performance, and health of all the machines under test.
A new area of support in Visual Studio is the ability to drive system performance tuning and diagnostics through the Visual Studio test tools. This enables developers to run profiling during tests.
Visual Studio Team System role-based editions add team-based software development functionality to Visual Studio for:
Software Architects
Team System Architecture edition focuses on improving the design and validation of distributed systems. It gives architechts, operations managers and developers the ability to increase the predictability of success by visually constructing service-oriented solutions and validating them against their operational environments prior to deployment.
Software Developers
Team System Development Edition enables developer to verify the performance and quality of the code they write before they deploy. Developers can now detect common coding and security-related issues earlier in the development cycle, reducing th eoverall cost of fixing code defects.
Database Professionals
Team System Database Edition enables databse professional with more control over their SQL server databases throughout the application life cycle, and with a foundation of change management and process integration through integrated set of funtionality that enables database developers and administrators to be more productive, increase security and drive quality.
Software Testers (including load testing)
Team System Test Edition intoduces a series of load testing tools for web applications and services that are integrated into the Visual Studio environment. These advanced load testing tools enable testers to author, execute, and manage tests and related work items-all from within Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Team Suite
Team System Team Suite provides multi-discipline team members with the flexibility to work seamlessly as an architecht, database professional, developer, and tester within Visula Studio. When used in conjunction with Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Team Suite fosters better team communication and provides transparency into the software development process.