Playing with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

It's been 2 weeks since I installed Visual Studio 2008 Team System Beta 2. But I've only play with this new "toy" since last week. Also this is my second time playing with Team Edition of Visual Studio. I have tried Visual Studio 2005 Team System few months ago, but only for a short time.

My first look of this tools is that the user interface has few changes. The first one is the start page news panes has a little change from the previous version. It's tab has slight change too. Also the toolbox tab and task tab has a slight change in appearance.

My most excitement using this tools, because of its Team System version. I never had a change to play with it, since the software price is high for me to afford, and it seems impossible for my company to buy this software at this moment. The one that I want to try is "code metric" future, and Test project. I've also tried Code Analysis feature, which I still not find useful enough right now.

One of my home little project that I work with this tools is to create a global GDI+ functions and methods that I'd like to use in my future projects. I'm tired of making the same GDI+ functions for each project, even if those are new functions. So I want to shorten my work, by grouping all stuff that I'd need in one library. Seems pretty neat isn't it? With this project, I'd like to explore more about Team System Edition and also the new .NET 3.5 features.

Back to the IDE, finally, VB has improved in its intellisense. Now, it works as C# does. You only need to type a word, then intellisense appeared immediately. Actually, I hope Microsoft would give this feature when they shipped VS 2005 Service Pack 1.

The New Project dialog also has a new appearance. You can target a specific .NET Framework version on your project, although I always choose the newest one. New item dialog has improvement too. Now, items divided in groups. You can view them in groups or view them all.

The menu has different highlighting. I bet they manually draw the renderer. The context menu is the same as well.

There's a new addition in project properties. One that I found just as I read this blog, is UAC settings. I bet this has something to do with Windows Vista UAC. I'll explore more about it when I have spare time in my home (since my office don't have Vista and probably don't want to use it in next few years). Framework targeting can be change here, but it require you to close the solution first.

Closing

There's only 4 months until Visual Studio 2008 RTM-ed. So, I guess, it'd be impossible to explore all new stuff. For now, I'll stay in learning how to use Test project. I hope it can go well and I can finish my current home project as well.