Tuesday, July 10, 2007

The goods in '08

Microsoft announced today that Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 will all be launching together on Feb 27, 2008 in LA. While there hasn't been nearly as much hype about these releases as there was for VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005, but there are still some really cool new features coming.

With VS 2008, we will see new designer features for WPF and ASP.NET like split screen viewing between HTML/XAML and the designer view. There will also be support for nested master pages in ASP.NET, and a wealth of other new features and improvements, and thats just Visual Studio. We also need to keep in mind that the .NET Framework v3.5 and C# 3.0 come out with these as well.

C# 3.0 includes the new LINQ style querying model, as well as a host of new ways to save time like Anonymous Types, Object and Collection Initializers, Extension Methods, and a bunch more.

As for SQL Server 2008, I haven't been following that nearly as closely, but there are still a number of new improvements I am awaiting like Merge statements, and FileStream data type. For a fairly concise over of the new features in SQL Server 2008, check out this article on CodeProject.

Thats it for now.