Tasting VS2008 for the First Time

I have been poking VS2008 tonight. The first thing I noticed is the speed difference. It is just plain faster than VS 2005. Faster to load, faster menus, just faster.

Although it is not news to those who have been playing with 2008 already I was a bit miffed to see that the project and solution files needed to be converted to VS2008 compatible. Given that project files are actually MSBuild files, why would this be necessary? I’m sure a little Googling could render the answer to me, but I can’t be bothered. It isn’t the end of the world, although the implications to automated builds could be significant.

VS2008 allows developers to target specific runtimes (2.0, 3.0, 3.5, etc.) but apparently this idea doesn’t extend to IDE compatibility. This means if one person on the team decides to upgrade everyone with code in the continuous integration build based on a solution or .*proj will also need to migrate. Bummer.

All that said, my project converted flawlessly and without issue. After converting my solution I opened project properties to get this drop down which lets me pick the CLR I wish to target (click for a bigger pick):

That’s pretty cool, I have to admit. Much cleaner than what we had to do to get 1.1 compatibility with VS 2005.

With Sugar, Please

And then I changed this:

        private string _Description;
        public string Description
        {
            get { return _Description; }
            set { _Description = value; }
        }

To this:

public string Description { get; set; }

And the I changed this:

  FSTask task = new FSTask();
  task.Name = "Name";
  task.Description = "Description";

To this:

FSTask task = new FSTask { Name = "Name", Description = "Description" };

And then I sighed in contentment. I have been wanting to do that since reading about it on ScottGu’s blog way back in March.

I will poke at it some more in the next few days and post more on my findings.