19 Nov
2007

Visual Studio 2008 First Looks

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imageI just opened my first project in Visual Studio 2008. I just started a console application to play around with.

The UI has received a little attention. You can see by the gradient colors on this properties dialog menu that someone on the Visual Studio team finally called someone over from the User Experience Group. Now, if those menus are so awesome, then I have a single window utility for working with unit tests, right?

Not so fast, Homer.

All kidding aside, there are some things to look forward to in Visual Studio. First of all, this is first version of Visual Studio to provide support for multiple frameworks out of the box. Here is a screen shot of the drop down on the Project Properties dialog that lets me target a specific framework.

image

Overall, Microsoft claims more than 250 new or improved features and I for one am content with the fact that this is a v.Next and not a v.NewThingCompletely.

I may be up all night playing with LINQ. Look what I can do:

   1: Console.WriteLine("Unioning sets");
   2:  
   3: int[] numbers1 = { 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 };
   4: int[] numbers2 = { 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 };
   5:  
   6: IEnumerable<int> allNums = from n in numbers1.Union<int>(numbers2)
   7:                            where n > 3
   8:                            orderby n
   9:                            select n;
  10:  
  11: foreach (int i in allNums)
  12: {
  13:     Console.Write(i + ", ");
  14: }

And it gives me this result.

Unioning sets
4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,

This is fun, I have to admit. It’s so new and shiny that the syntax high lighter in Live Writer doesn’t see all the keywords. You want to really go to bed late, work your way through this page of 101 LINQ samples. That’s what I’m doing.