Visual Studio 2008 comes with a lot of enhancements to its earlier counterpart. This article takes a quick tour of the new features in the Visual Studio.NET 2008 IDE. Here is a list of the new features added to Visual Studio 2008 that we will discuss in this article:
- Support for Multi-targeting
- Integrated Ajax Support
- Support for Split View
- Integrated Silverlight Support
- LINQ
- Support for inbuilt Silverlight SDK
- Support for inbuilt C++ SDK
- Support for Multilingual User Interface
- Support for Nested Master Pages
- Support for JavaScript Debugging
- Support for JavaScript Intellisense
Getting Started with the Visual Studio .NET 2008 IDE
Before we delve deep into the features we just listed, let’s take a look the steps for downloading and installing Visual Studio.NET 2008 in our system. To install Visual Studio 2008 you should have Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 2003 with SP2.
To proceed with the installation you need to follow the steps below.
1. A dialog box will be displayed as soon as you insert the Visual Studio 2008 DVD into your DVD drive; or, as soon as you double click on the Setup file.
2. Click the next button as shown in the figure below:
3. Next, click the Next button once the initial steps are done.
4. Enter the License Agreement details and click the Next button.
5. Select the installation type from the three options (Default, Full or Custom) as shown in the figure below:
Once the installation is complete, restart your system to ensure the changes are effected – the registry is properly updated, etc. And, you are done! The sections that follows will discuss the new features in Visual Studio.NET 2008 that we listed earlier.