By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Dec. 17, 2007

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Visual Studio 2008 is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship developer product. Along with the accompanying release of the .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 includes significant new features that help developers access data; brings Visual Studio up to date with new features introduced with Windows Vista, the .NET Framework 3.0, and Office 2007; and further improves Visual Studio as a Web development tool.

Visual Studio is a key part of Microsoft's developer platform and, along with the .NET Framework, is one of the company's greatest competitive advantages. The quality of the development environment—the ease with which it lets developers create and maintain code—bolsters the success of other Microsoft businesses, such as Windows and Office. Continuing to improve Visual Studio is important not only to Microsoft's developer tools business but to the company as a whole.

Specifically, Visual Studio 2008 offers improvements in the following areas:

Database access. The feature that will have the broadest impact is Language Integrated Query (LINQ). LINQ allows Visual Basic (VB) and C# developers to access data from XML, relational databases, and in-memory data structures in a way that most will find substantially quicker and simpler to code, less error-prone, and easier to debug and maintain.

Other .NET improvements. The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been updated to better support the growing popularity of REpresentational State Transfer (REST) or so-called RESTful Web services—Web services that avoid certain Web service protocols in favor of simpler alternatives. WCF also supports the latest version of several Web service protocols for Transactions and Reliable Messaging.

Integrated development environment (IDE) improvements. The Visual Studio IDE has been updated to support some features of the .NET Framework introduced with Windows Vista in Dec. 2006, including the Windows Presentation Foundation UI library. IDE improvements also help developers who must build applications that run on older versions of the .NET Framework.

Updated Office support. Visual Studio 2008 enables developers to build applications that take advantage of Office 2007, particularly the new UI introduced with that release. Other changes make debugging and deploying Office-based applications simpler, lowering the cost of development.

Web development. Visual Studio is also used to build Web applications, particularly those that run on Microsoft's ASP.NET platform. With this release, Visual Studio gains new features that help Web developers, including better support for authoring Cascading Style Sheets and debugging JavaScript.

Looking beyond Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft will bring portions of the .NET Framework to the Mac through Silverlight 2.0, its tool for developing lightweight, interactive Web applications, and will update portions of the .NET Framework to improve database access by making it easier to build "occasionally connected" applications—applications that make an offline copy of important data, allow the user to update the data, and then synchronize changes with the original data source when the application is connected to the network once again.

Longer term, a major update to Visual Studio Team System—the team development portion of Visual Studio—could expand the reach of that product to better support automated testing. The Visual Studio release after that will be part of Microsoft's "Oslo" wave of products aimed at delivering updated messaging and workflow technologies, along with more comprehensive application modeling. Neither of those updates, however, is expected before 2009 at the earliest.

What's Ahead

This report outlines the major improvements in Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, including the C# and VB programming languages and IDE.

"LINQ Leads .NET Framework 3.5" describes new features of the .NET Framework and the programming languages used by developers.

"Improving Productivity and Catching Up with .NET" describes improvements made in the Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

"Tools for Office Updated" explains the ways Visual Studio 2008 helps developers build applications on top of the Office suite.

"Web Development in Visual Studio 2008" provides an overview of new features for those creating Web sites and applications.

"Future Directions" highlights what's coming after Visual Studio 2008 and lays out the product roadmap.

The "Appendix: Visual Studio 2008 Pricing" summarizes the licensing costs for Visual Studio 2008 and associated products.