Introduction

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.