Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 - (Page 23)

d02dino_p6ma 12/11/07 8:33 AM Page 23 any piece of the Visual Studio 2008 UI adapts to the target platform. The toolbox of controls, compiler settings, the list of assemblies to reference, IntelliSense on objects, and, of course, binaries are all specific to the selected platform. The target platform is not a definitive choice. At any moment, you can upgrade or downgrade to any of the supported targets. You do this from the property pages of the project in the Solution Explorer (Figure 2). Should you install Visual Studio 2008 if you’re mostly maintaining existing .NET Framework 2.0 applications? Clearly, the big news about Visual Studio 2008 is the support it offers for 3.x .NET applications. However, even from a platform-agnostic perspective, there’s something it offers—an improved set of facilities with a particular attention to web developers. JavaScript debugger, CSS, master pages designer, and LINQ helper tools are all features available independently from the target platform. and VB programming easier and more pleasant. “Automatic properties” is a feature that instructs the compiler to automatically add a default implementation for the getter/setter methods of a class property. This code is now perfectly legal in a class compiled with the newest C# compiler: public string ContactName { get; set;} nario. At a later time, you can always come back and provide your own getter/setter methods. Object initializers are another piece of syntactic sugar to speed up the creation of the code that initializes an object. Instead of going through a potentially long list of assignment instructions, you can code it like this: Person person = new Person { FirstName="Dino", LastName="Esposito", Age=24 }; The compiler automatically expands this code like this: private string contactName; public string ContactName { get { return contactName; } set { contactName = value; } } The idea is extended to collections, as in this code: List friends = new List { new Person { FirstName="Nancy", LastName= "Davolio", Age=28 }, new Person { FirstName= "Andrew", LastName= "Fuller", Age=35 }, : }; Automatically generated get/set properties are not equivalent to public fields. From a metadata perspective, properties and fields are quite different entities. The idea here is that you just delegate to the compiler the creation of some plumbing code, in the most common and simple sce- Compared to the syntax required in Visual Studio 2005, the savings is pretty clear continued on page 26 Some C# and VB Syntactic Sugar In Visual Studio 2008, C# and Visual Basic offer a few time-saving features that basically give the compiler the burden of creating some required code. In the end, these features are just syntactic sugar that make C# Figure 1: Choosing a target platform for a Visual Studio 2008 project. Figure 2: Upgrade the target .NET of an existing project. February 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 23 http://www.scitools.com http://www.scitools.com 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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