My Take on Visual Studio 2008
I just finished five days of Visual Studio 2005 (.NET 2.0) training, with a day of Visual Studio 2008 (.NET 3.5) sprinkled on. My take on VS2008 are as follows:
First, AJAX integration is very tight. I have actually done AJAX the manual way before (with PHP) and I appreciate how much coding VS has tucked away behind the scenes. Now all you need to do is to put an AJAX UpdatePanel in your web page and drag controls (the GridView being an obvious example) into the UpdatePanel. For controls in the UpdatePanel, calls to the server are done asynchronously, without postbacks. The codebehind remains the same.
Second, you quickly get used to the new var keyword. At first glance it seems inconsequential. Instead of int x = 1 you now can type var x = 1. So what, right? But after doing it for just a couple of times - especially with the foreach statement - you feel a slight easing of the brain. You just attack the problem at hand without having to think ahead in terms variable types.
Third is LINQ. This is the most famous .NET 3.5 capability. I’m not sure whether this is an endorsement of inline SQL; for some of us, stored procedures are like religion. But putting database queries aside, it does give you a slightly easier way to filter out, say, strings from Lists.
Fourth, IntelliSense and breakpoint-debugging for Javascript are features that should simply have been included a long time ago.
Fifth, automatic properties can certainly help make your plain-vanilla classes more succinct.
In conclusion, I see VS2008 as providing lots of high-level language shortcuts for developers. So again, here we see C# pulling ahead of Java that much more. As a C# programmer who’s in it for long-term career reasons, I don’t see my professional life being affected very much except maybe a little less typing [1].
Notes
[1] I never actually intended for this to be a double entendre. I didn’t even get it at first!
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