Moth in the Spotlight

SESSION 1
Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET framework v3.5

It was clear that Daniel Moth wanted to get off to a good start and broke the ice with a comedic routine that Bobby Davro would have been proud of. Once the laughter had died down, it was onto the business of the day...

He started by guiding us through a timeline of the .NET framework and said that, as developers, we should think of the framework as a number of seperate components (i.e. tool, languages, libraries and clr) rather than a single entity. There is no new clr in VS2008 and Daniel exclaimed that this is a good thing for reasons he would reveal later in the presentation.

According to the speaker, the most important new feature of VS2008 is LINQ with approximately 8 to 10 sessions at this years TechEd being devoted to the technology. In addition, he outlined a number of important enhancements to the latest release, namely Workflow, AJAX and device emulation.

v3.5 adds approximately 15 new assemblies to the 2.0 and 3.0 frameworks. VS2008 guarantees backward compatability and affords the developer the means to work against any previous framework version simply by selecting from a drop-down list.

Daniel identified those areas of VS2008 where most progress had been made:

Multi-Targeting
The ability to select the most appropriate framework for your project. If the developer selects the latest framework, all assemblies from prior versions of the framework are available. You can even switch versions part way through the development process which will either limit the functionality (If you go from a later to earlier version) or present the developer with additional functionality.

Compiler Features
The speaker discussed new additions for VS2008 including:-

• Integrated AJAX libraries and project templates.
• ListViw, DataPages and LinqDataSource.
• The new HTML designer window.
• Synchronised split view.
• JavaScript intellisense and debugging facilities.
• New support for CSS including auto-ordering of rules, CSS property window etc.
  

After highlighting the new features for developing mobile applications, Window applications and the Windows Communication Foundation, Daniel demonstrated the new features of VS2008 can extend the functionality of Office applications. Traditionally, VBA has been the main route for customising Office application, however Daniel demonstrated that new Office functionality - such as Excel add-ins - can be easily constructed and deployerd via VS2008.

C#
The speaker discussed a number of enhancements to the language such as the new VAR keyword for Type inference. For example, the statement:

VAR arr = new[] {3,56,34,666,7}

will construct a variable of type int32.

Assemblies

The speaker concluded by identifying the 15 main assemblies included in VS2008:

• System.Core.dll
• System.Data.Linq.dll
• System.Xml.Linq.dll
• System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll
• System.Web.Extensions.dll
• System.WorkflowServices.dll
• System.ServiceModel.Web.dll
• System.AddIn.dll,
• System.AddIn.Contract.dll
• System.Windows.Presentaion.dll
• System.Net.dll
• System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.dll
• System.Management.Instumentation.dll
• System.VisualC.STLCLR.dll

Excellent work Daniel!