Code named “Orcas”, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has several new features and enhancements that will make things easier for developers. It will be the last version that will render support to C++ and Windows 200 applications. It will bear a version number 9.0 and format version 1.0. the new release will focus on developing Windows Vista, web applications, and tools for 2007 Office System.

New features in Visual Studio 2008

LINQ Support

LINQ is a collection of several standard query operators. It enables developers to work with data in numerous flexible ways without any restrictions. The newly introduced LINQ support will enable developers to debug programs through a step-by-step query based procedure.

AJAX Support for ASP.NET

AJAX control library was not forming part of the Visual Studio package until this introduction. In the new 2008 release, AJAX support for ASP.NET is a built-in functionality embedded with several AJAX control components including TreeView, Menu, web parts, etc.

JavaScript Debugging Support

JavaScript Debugging had been a difficult process in the previous versions. The debugging has made a lot simpler and easier in Visual Studio 2008 by breaking down the entire process into several break points which can be processed on step at a time.

Feature to Organize Imports or Usings

Namespace imports or usings can be better organized in Visual Studio 2008. Developers can select all unwanted namespaces by right clicking them and organize them using commands like "Sort Usings", "Remove Unused Usings" or "Remove and Sort usings”.

Visual Studio 2008 Split View

In Visual Studio 2008, developers will be able to split the design and coding screens vertically across two separate screens of laptops/wide-screen monitors. This will facilitate quick coding as any ASP markup text or HTML errors highlighted in the code screen will be highlighted in the design screen too.

Intellisense Filtering

In VS 2005, when a keyword was given as input in the Intellisense box, all the results containing the keyword used to pop up. It was not an easy way of IntelliSense filtering and caused significant difficulty in routine usage. That difficulty is now eliminated with the help of an improved IntelliSense filtering which is primed to display only accurate results relating to the keyword.

Inbuilt SDK for C++

In the 2005 version, downloading and integrating the C++ SDK for Visual Studio was an uphill task. However, with the inbuilt C++ SDK in VS 2008, it will be fairly easy and fuss-free.

MUI Support (Multilingual User Interface Architecture)

MUI contains text language packages from Microsoft Libraries and Microsoft Windows. With the MUI integration, VS 2008 will be able to allow users to toggle between 9 different languages including English, Spanish, Italian, French, Japanese, German, Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Chinese and Korean.

Free Commercial license

Visual Studio 2008 comes with free hosting on Visual Studio Express projects and Popfly webpages. This will save developers from having to incur large sums of money to host their projects. There is also a wide range of free educational resources and samples like P2P toolkit, Coding4Fun Development Kit, C++ Game Development Kit all of which makes Visual Studio 2008 better than the 2005 version.