Microsoft announced the availability Thursday of the second beta version of its upcoming Visual Studio 2008 developer tools and the last version of its Silverlight rich media software code before the final version ships.
The second version of VS 2008, which is still scheduled to ship before the end of the year, includes a Silverlight add-in that allows developers to start building Silverlight rich Internet applications in Visual Studio 2008 and work with designer colleagues using the new Expression Web design tool, Microsoft said. With this beta release, VS 2008, is 99 percent complete, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.
Scott Guthrie, general manager of Microsoft’s Developer Division, noted in a blog post yesterday that one of the biggest features Web developers will discover in this beta version of VS 2008 is a “dramatically improved HTML designer” and rich Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) support. VS 2008 now uses the same Web designer that ships with Microsoft’s new Expression Web design tool, he added.
“In addition to providing lots of new functionality, you’ll also find that this Web designer is much faster than the VS 2005 version (which was based on a much older code base),”

Visual Studio 2008 is expected to ship by the end of the year, with Beta 2 the last major milestone before release. One thing missing in Beta 2 is the ability to reference Windows Vista’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in a Silverlight Web services application, although this can be done via the command line for those in a pinch. Microsoft is hoping that they can grab Web developers with Silverlight, and then move them to a Visual Studio development environment, which of course only runs on Windows.
Microsoft is also extending its “Go Live” license option to users of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2. This allows users who sign up for the Go Live license to start deploying applications developed in those environments, even before VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are out of beta.
Visual Studio 2008 Download

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 4:54 am and is filed under Breaking News, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.