This isn’t yet another post about the release of Visual Orcas 2008 Beta 2. Many of you probably know about the release. I want to point out some important installation notes posted by Scott Guthrie concerning installing VS2008 Beta 2. There are two steps you have to go through post installation.
First run a batch file that will fix the System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly version binding policy. If you don’t run this batch file your applications built with VS 2005 will have a dependency with .NET 3.5. Which means that your .NET 2.0 applications will use the System.Web.Extensions.dll for .NET 3.5.
Second step is to reset some old VS 2008 Beta 1 settings. If you don’t do this you are going to experience some IDE performance slowness in the Beta 2 version.
You can read about the new features here:
I just installed Beta 2 on my laptop, and it went smoothly. I actually was so satisfied with VS 2008 Beta 2 that I removed VS 2005 from the computer. I know this is a drastic move, but I don’t use this computer for any production code anyway. All of my work development environment are installed and run on virtual machines.
I remember when I installed a beta of VS 2003 five/six years ago – yes, I just realize how quickly the years have gone by since then. I remember that there was no built in refactoring support, no framework for unit testing, no JavaScript debugging and intellisense and no LINQ. Back then it was the .NET framework itself that was mind blowing. The managed code model with the Garbage collector that could even turn average joe in to a decent developer. I’m glad Microsoft went for the Managed approach and I will say that they have rally succeeded in developing a platform in .NET. Their managed to built support for the .NET platform into their product line as well. Heck, you can even write your stored procedures in C# for SQL Server 2005 or C# in the browser using Silverlight. Safari (browser for Mac OS) support Silverlight, which mean that you can run .NET code on an Apple computer! And I must not forget to mention the products that have been built up on top of the .NET framework. Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, SharePoint, BizTalk and of course all the great products that have been developed by 3rd party developers for their customers. And there are many more examples (XNA, DLR etc).
The community around the platform has grown and the ecosystem is growing larger for every day. DotNetNuke, CruiseControl.Net, Spring.NET, NHibernate, NUnit, NMock, Castle Project, NDoc, NDepend, DasBlog etc. I use many this frameworks in my daily job at Abeo and some of them are must have tools for me.
It’s a good time to be a developer and I’m having lots of fun!
I really hope everyone is enjoying their summer vacation. My girlfriend (Astrid) and I are heading for Greece in a week :)