Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 - (Page 22)

d02dino_p6ma 12/7/07 2:13 PM Page 22 Core Technology by Dino Esposito Inside Visual Studio 2008 Boosting developer productivity Since the release of the .NET Framework 1.0, Microsoft has committed to a made-to-measure programming environment with each new version of its managed framework. But for a number of reasons, this tradition was interrupted last year when .NET Framework 3.0 made its debut Dino writes the ASP.NET-2-The-Max newsletter for DDJ. He can be contacted at weblogs.asp.net/despos/. without a new version of Visual Studio. This year, however, .NET 3.5 comes out with a new programming environment—Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio is designed as a container environment that integrates the functionality of multiple visual designers for just about any supported type of application and component. This means you have readymade templates for a variety of Windows and web application types, including Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET sites, and web services. In addition, Visual Studio 2008 offers ad hoc designers for creating workflows and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. The characteristics of each output component are managed through projects, and in turn grouped in solution containers. The true added value of Visual Studio—and perhaps the primary reason to consider upgrades—is the boost it gives to developer productivity. Dozens of wizards, smart and context-sensitive popup windows, effective debuggers, and visual designers are examples of facilities that may not necessarily make any code automatically smarter, but still help you focus on key points—skimming over chores, repetitive tasks, and overzealous procedures. with shortcuts to different versions of Visual Studio based on the projects I maintained at the time: Visual Studio 2002 for .NET Framework 1.0 applications, Visual Studio 2003 for .NET Framework 1.1, and Visual Studio 2005 for .NET Framework 2.0 applications. Finally, Visual Studio 2008 introduces a cool feature called “multitargeting” that lets us create applications for specific versions of the .NET Framework. Multitargeting brings two main benefits to the table: • You no longer need to install two or more different versions of Visual Studio to deal with the various clients and projects. • You are no longer subliminally invited to upgrade to the next, super-cool version of .NET because of the new, super-cool time-saving features of the next Visual Studio. One IDE fits all .NET Frameworks, you could say. All frameworks? Well, not exactly. Multitargeting in Visual Studio 2008 starts with .NET 2.0 (Figure 1) and should continue for most of the foreseeable future versions. Significant changes in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) that occurred between .NET 1.1 and 2.0 made it impossible to extend multitargeting to just any existing versions of the Framework. The nice thing about multitargeting is that Multitarget Projects Have you noticed that previous releases of Visual Studio only supported one version of the .NET Framework? For years, my desktop was swarming 22 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l February 2008 http://weblogs.asp.net/despos/ http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook South American Software Development Conversations Inside Visual Studio 2008 BibPort: Creating Bibliographic References Continuous LINQ The ZK Framework Static Testing C++ Code The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

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