Improving Productivity and Catching Up with .NET

With Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft’s developer tools are catching up to the version of the .NET Framework that shipped with Windows Vista in Dec. 2006 and making it much easier for developers to employ the new Framework. The new Visual Studio also contains the usual mix of improvements aimed at boosting developer productivity by automating previously manual tasks.

Besides being an IDE, Visual Studio is also a platform that is used by third parties to build their own tools or incorporated by ISVs into their applications. Those roles are discussed in the sidebar “Visual Studio as a Platform“.

Catching Up with the Platform

Although the .NET Framework 3.0 shipped in Dec. 2006 as part of Windows Vista, developers had no Visual Studio tools specifically designed for the new version. Developers could use Visual Studio 2005 to create applications for the .NET Framework 3.0, but had to do so using generic tools. Visual Studio 2008 fills this gap.

XAML Designer

The most visible improvement is the inclusion of a graphical tool for editing the XML Application Markup Language (XAML) files that form the core of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). XAML is an XML format for describing the UI of an application, including 2D and 3D graphics, multimedia such as audio and video, and animations, as well as traditional elements such as buttons and list boxes.