Visual Studio 2008

I installed Visual Studio 2008 yesterday and have been itching to get my feet wet with it. There are a lot of cool features in the 3.5 framework, and a lot of improvements in the development environment as well. One feature I am particularly interested in is multi-targeting, which gives you the option to choose a target framework (and hence deployment environment) other than the default 3.5 version.

To me this is a huge improvement. It's one thing to fire up a new version of VS and crank out some sample projects, but as soon as you want to deploy them into an environment that does not yet support the newest framework version you are stuck. What ends up happening is a sort of dual existence between the old and new version, with existing code dragging you back into the old version of the framework for way longer than you really want to be there. The promise of multi-targeting is that you immediately reap the benefits of the new IDE and some of the framework classes while still being able to work on projects that are targeted for a previous framework version.

My first experience with 2008 was to convert an existing 2.0 ASP.NET solution that has five projects. I knew you could choose a target environment for new projects but I was not sure how it would work converting an existing one; it turned out to be no problem:



I chose not to upgrade because I want to be able to deploy the app on my current 2.0 host. The conversion succeeded, the app built on the first try, and it ran without a problem. Next came the real test: push it out to my web host, which is running the 2.0 framework, and see if there are any hiccups. I am happy to report that so far I have not run into any problems, and I am looking forward to really digging in to see what 2008 has to offer.