I just finished downloading my copy of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 via the Microsoft Developer Network. What’s weird about it is I was able to download the Professional Edition, which still has the coming soon prompt. Not sure how it happened but maybe it’s a perk of being part of the MSDN network. Anyway, here’s the usual salutation email that MS sends out everytime you download an evaluation copy of Visual Studio.

Thank you for signing up for the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Professional Edition Evaluation Experience.

Visual Studio 2008 enables developers and development teams to create great connected applications on the latest platforms, including the Web, Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008.

This e-mail message includes key resources that can help you get the most out of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Beta 2. We will continue to provide you with relevant and comprehensive content via the MSDN Flash, customized for you to enrich your evaluation experience.

Here’s a pointwise (per topic) compilation of what’s new in VS 2008. I’ll just post the link to each topic since having them defined in one post will too long for comfort. I’ll keep playing around with the new version of VS and see if it’s worth migrating to since a lot of things have to be considered especially compatibility with SQL Server 2005 and the new SQL Server 2008.

What’s New:

• Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
  • Settings Migration
  • Community Components
  • Community and Help Menus
  • Window Management
  • Class Designer
• Projects and Solutions
  • Web Application Projects
  • AJAX Development
  • Project Designer
  • Deployment
• Editing
  • New Design View and CSS Design Tools
  • IntelliSense for Jscript and ASP.NET AJAX
  • Object Browser and Find Symbol Support for Multi-targeting
  • WPF Designer
• Data
• Language-Integrated Query (LINQ)
• Client Application Services
• Reporting
  • New Report Projects
  • Report Wizard
  • Expression Editor Enhancement
  • ReportViewer Printing
  • PDF Compression
• MSBuild
  • Target a Specific .NET Framework
  • Multiple Processor Capabilities
  • Enhanced Logging
  • Item Definitions
  • Assembly Location and Name Changes

Since .NET 3.5 Framework is required to make Visual Studio 2008 run, here’s a rundown of features for it as well:

ASP.NET

• Support for enabling existing ASP.NET 2.0 pages for AJAX
• Creation of ASMX & WCF based web services and consuming them from AJAX Library
• ASP.NET server side application services like authentication, roles management exposed as web services
• ASP.NET Merge Tool – a new tool for merging pre-compiled assemblies
• New ListView control which supports edit, insert, delete, sorting & paging
• ASP.NET integrated with core IIS 7.0 which makes ASP.NET services like authentication & caching available for other content types also.
• Microsoft AJAX Library to support AJAX based web development

Base Classes & CLR

• Support for CSharp 3.0 including LINQ.
• HashSet : A high performance collection of type set.
• Time Zone Improvements : to develop applications which operate in multiple time zones
• Minor Improvements in Threading, Reflection and controlling the GC behavior

Others

• Client Application Services : All windows based application to use ASP.NET login, roles and profile services hosted on central server.
• Occasionally Connected Services (OCS) : keeps windows application’s local and remote data in sync.
• ‘Silver’ : code name for a new technology which unifies WF and WCF
• WCF Syndication : WCF services exposing syndication feeds. Supports Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0