VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are out
Every time someone tells how powerful today’s computers areand how one should always trade performance for good architecture, testabilityand thousand other great things - I want to hit guy on the head. And I'm not aviolent person. It just sucks to right click in the windows explorer and wait20 seconds before context menu shows up or get "calculating remainingtime" when trying to copy files around (yes, I'm still getting those in myall powerful Vista occasionally). Apparently, today’s computers have so muchpower that they can't concentrate on such minuscule tasks, and processor has todo complicated calculations in the background just to keep itself entertained.
I downloaded Web Developer Express 2008 (final RTM release) yesterday, have noidea what its architecture looks like but I'm really happy with this product.It is fast and it is smart and the whole experience can be summarized as surprisinglypainless. My absolutely favorite feature so far – multi-targeting. When I triedto open existing Asp.net 2.0 site, it simply asked me if I want to upgrade itto 3.5 or use it as is. And when I chose the second, it promptly loaded only2.0 features, no pause no nothing. And everything just worked without a glitch.It seems faster and more responsive than VS 2005, the intellisense jumps outfaster and only shows relevant items, Ajax is built in into both framework(3.5) and IDE, CSS support looks awesome, visual designer much improved andtons of other little things just got better. I liked it so much that returningback to VS 2005 at work this morning felt like going back to Chicagofrom Caribbean vacations in January. If youdidn’t get your hands on it yet – you should!
