Visual Studio 2008 builds on the productivity and developer experience improvements delivered in Visual Studio 2005. The development process used to create Visual Studio 2008 enabled the individual feature teams to focus on the final quality of the feature throughout the entire development process. This approach raises the overall product quality significantly. In addition, the overall developer experience with the Visual Studio 2008 is improved through the ability of Visual Studio to build and target all the platforms that developers have been using in their projects over the last few years. This enables development teams to adopt Visual Studio 2008 without a corresponding IT cost in deploying new framework components.
Developer experience includes:
· Build using Visual Studio 2008, target different .NET Framework platforms
o Developers have traditionally required tools that are bound to the runtime platform that they are building against. With Visual Studio they can now use one toolset and target the desired platform.
· Improvements to the Windows Forms designer
o Windows Forms continue to provide developers with the features and functionality required to build compelling Line-Of-Business applications. With Visual Studio 2008 the design-time experience for Windows Forms UI and component developers has continued to improve. Improvements in the performance of the designer enable developers to be more productive when building a Windows Forms application. In addition, the simplification of a design-time error list provides developers with more usable feedback, and an ability to ignore and continue, thus easing the overall development task.
· Product Quality Improvements
o Continued focus on improving product quality, and fundamental changes in the way Microsoft builds developers tools, enables Microsoft to deliver a high quality tool with significant servicing investments over previous versions.
· Leverage existing UI investments
o Visual Studio not only provides new designers for building the next generation of applications, but also makes it easy for developers to extend existing applications to deliver high-quality user experiences. Enhancements to the existing Windows Forms designer enable task-oriented designs for creating applications that leverage Windows Forms, .NET Framework 3.0, and XAML in one application. This includes providing a design-time experience for using this Windows Presentation Foundation content in an existing Windows Forms application by enabling the Windows Forms visual designer to place and visually layout the new content in relation to the other controls on the form. This ability also enables Windows Forms content to be placed into a new application built on the Windows Presentation Foundation.
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