RSSVisual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5 to Be Released This Month, Launched Later
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 5, 2007, 11:26 AM
At the TechEd conference in Barcelona earlier this morning European time, Microsoft developer division corporate vice president S. Somasegar told attendees to expect the final Visual Studio 2008 to be shipped sometime in late November 2007. Since it is now early November 2007, that gives the company a pretty narrow RTM window.
But the "marketing launch" for the product is described as being set for February 2008, which means all the big parties will be delayed until after the holidays. Microsoft may have chosen to follow a Vista-like rollout model, making the next edition of its development suite available to volume license customers and MSDN subscribers first. The company had already slated a rollout party for SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 for February, and VS 2008's contribution to the champagne will apparently wait until then.
Last June, a Microsoft product manager declared VS 2008 "99% feature complete." This morning, we got a clearer picture of the 1% that completes the product mix.
Somasegar mentioned a new add-in called Popfly Explorer, whose purpose will be to enable Silverlight developers to more effectively create "mash-up" applications using Web services and animated front-ends. BetaNews first explored the early alphas of Popfly last May, and it's being described as Microsoft's answer to Yahoo Pipes.
Using the new add-in, Somasegar said in a blog post this morning, a developer can more easily create Silverlight gadgets and directly publish them to existing Web pages. This functionality will require the new 3.5 version of the .NET Framework, which Somasegar still refers to as ".NET FX," so the final edition will be made available later this month.
What has been called Microsoft's answer to Google Gears will also be shipping as part of VS 2008: Microsoft Sync Framework is being described as an engine for synchronizing databases across disparate platforms, such as from local networks to mobile devices. The idea is to help enterprise developers build more robust, data-driven applications with the added comfort of built-in portability.
As Microsoft describes it, the Sync Framework enables a network application to take on one of the roles of a server app, becoming what it calls a "synchronization provider." Once equipped with the provider component code, the application becomes capable of presenting replica data in varying scales of formats, including the old familiar ADO.NET but incorporating RSS and Atom as well.
What's interesting about this is that it conceivably divorces network applications from direct reliance upon Microsoft server platforms. In so doing, it has those applications swallow a little bit of those platforms unto themselves.
Amen.
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|3 is more of building onto 2 so your old apps should work fine. There is a stupid "conversion" but have found the only thing that is changing is your solution file gets smaller somehow.
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|That's true, .Net 3.0 is the exact same complier as .Net 2.0 it just has extra namespaces. Visual Studio 2008 doesn't ship with .Net 3.0 though, it ships with .Net 3.5 which despite Microsoft's screwed up numbering scheme is actually a new compiler from both 2.0 and 3.0.
So basically .Net 3.0 should have been called something like .Net 2.1 or 2.5 at most. .Net 3.5 should have been the real .Net 3.0.
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|How about full backwards compatibility? Most apps that are "serious", aka big-company development, won't touch .net, and rightfully so.
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|Yeah, why can't all apps that work in XP also work in Windows 3.11? Full backwards compatability is unnecessary. That's like car manufacturers making cars that run on unleaded gasoline also able to run on leaded. Because, hey, "serious" cars run on leaded gas! .NET is here, and it's not bad just because Microsoft came up with it. And how do you know that big-companies developers won't touch .net? Have you talked to all of them?
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|Is .net 3.5 an upgrade to 3.0 or is it a separate framework like 2 vs 3? Hopefully it is an upgrade so we don't end up with .net 3 apps and .net 3.5 apps and we have to maintain/run both frameworks.
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|Well currently I'm running .Net 1, 2, and 3 for various apps, which is tedious.
Fortunately they decided last time that 2 would be packaged in with 3, so that meant less hassle installing.
However, to your question, I suggest you'd be lucky. It's bound to be separate.
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|3.0 was not really "separate" from 2.0 because you can't have 3.0 without 2.0. In contrast, it is possible to have 2.0 without 1.x so 2.0 was truly separate from 1.x.
3.5 is an upgrade on top of 3.0. In fact, it is a very small upgrade, at least in terms of physical code size.
Based on Beta 2 (build 20706), if you dissect dotNetFx35setup and take away all the installation "overhead" (language localization files, EULA text and other setup UI content, setup logging and error reporting, OS pre-requisite checking, etc.) the remainder is a relatively trivial amount of new code. There are a handful of assemblies containing enhancements to portions of existing class hierarchies like System.Core, System.Data, System.Management, System.Net, System.Web, etc. There are some new classes like the long-awaited System.Xml.Linq. There is a VC++ 9.0 runtime to support those implementations, along with replacements for csc.exe/vbc.exe/msbuild.exe (mainly to handle JIT compilation for ASP.NET but would also support other non-VS development).
Unlike the 3.0 upgrade which carried minor hassles for some systems (such as RGB9RAST for hardware incapable of supporting DirectX 9), the 3.5 upgrade is very low-impact if you have already moved to 3.0.
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