Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – codename ‘Orcas’

A simplified overview, by Ian MacGillivray

First things first - what is Visual Studio anyway?

Just like Word is a program you can use to write documents, Visual studio is, at its most basic level, simply a program you can use to write code. It offers many unique features over other similar programs (known as ‘development environments’) such as a visual designer – dragging pictures instead of manually typing code. Visual Studio is designed to take advantage of the .NET framework – Microsoft’s set of basic modules which programmers can utilise to develop their own applications. Using the .NET framework instead of another (such as Java) has a lot of advantages (and some disadvantages), with one of the major ones being that programs will run beautifully and securely on Windows computers and servers. The current released version of Visual Studio is simply called Visual Studio 2005.

So why bother upgrading from Visual Studio 2005?

The .NET (‘dotnet’) framework

The .NET framework has been upgraded over time, going from .NET 1.0 (now very rarely used and unsupported) to .NET 2.0 (which most programs are currently written in) through to .NET 3.0 (some newer programs) and now .NET 3.5 (only the newest stuff from adopters). Orcas allows programmers to ‘target’ any one of these frameworks, which means that developers can choose to create or maintain an older project, or can take advantage of all of the latest features put into .NET 3.5. Visual Studio 2005 can only target up to .NET 2.0, which doesn’t support such great modules as LINQ, WPF and Silverlight.

LINQ (‘link’)

‘Language INtegrated Query’ is a new feature in the programming language C# (‘See sharp’) – a popular language to use with .NET, which allows for very powerful and very easy data access and manipulation by a programmer, something which in the past could cause a lot of hassle.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Very cool and very flashy – this is what was used to create the British Library and London Underground applications that you may have seen various Microsoft people showing off before. This is a graphical add-on to the .NET framework and allows for a very clear separation between developers (people writing code) and designers (artists drawing nice interfaces) – the designer/developer split.

Silverlight

You may hear this being called ‘WPF/E’ (‘W.P.F.E’), but Silverlight is now the only official name for it. Silverlight is similar to WPF, in that it’s a graphical add-on to the .NET framework, but Silverlight has the advantage of being ‘cross-platform, cross-browser’ (works on Windows, Mac, Linux etc, works in Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox etc), and as such can be used anywhere on the internet, built into websites. Unfortunately this means it’s a bit limited, and can’t do real 3D graphics like WPF can, but Silverlight still has a lot of selling points over its direct rival (and similar product) – Adode Flash.

Rich Web Design

‘Rich’ is a buzzword that’s used to denote a product which offers a lot more than the basics – Word is a rich text editor, notepad is a basic one. Orcas offers webpage designers a host of new features that make working with web-design a lot more productive, and in some cases even more powerful too.

WYSIWYG (‘whis-e-wig’) editing

What You See Is What You Get – as developers write HTML they see their webpage being updated in real time, instead of having to run the program each time, which can really slow things down.

Javascript Intelli-sense and Debugging

Javascript is another programming language, which is used on webpages for forms, ‘dynamic’ (changing) content and many other fancy features. Without it, most things on the web would just be static, instead of allowing people to interact. Orcas lets developers debug (find problems and fix them) for the first ever time in javascript, which was previously a nightmare to do. It also provides ‘intelli-sense’ (suggesting what code comes next - think predictive text messaging), allowing developers to work faster, and sometimes discover commands and options they never knew existed.

Designer/Developer Split

A big selling point around all of Orcas, especially valuable in web design - teams can now fully divide responsibilities between the development team and the design team, so that artists and user interface creators no longer need to know bits of program code, and that programmers no longer need to try and create interfaces with code.

Security

Microsoft, in collaboration with partners, have developed a large set of ‘best practises’ for designing software, to ensure that it meets with standards that prevent security flaws, incompatibilities and dangerously inefficient behaviour. A third party tool, called FxCop has now been fully integrated into Visual Studio with Orcas which checks code to ensure it meets with these standards. Developers can however, choose to always turn off certain warnings, or all of them.

VSTO

Visual Studio Tools (for) Office allows developers to customise and add functionality to the Microsoft Office suite of products. When it comes to internal communications, productivity, and interaction with customers, this can prove very powerful indeed. For example, a company that commonly deals with Powerpoint slides could perhaps build a slide reader into Outlook, allowing people to flick through slides in the email preview pane. A company that sends out automated letters on purchase can simply have a Word template saying “Thank you <name> for buying <product>” – filling in the blanks automatically from a database without having to employ an admin person to do this manually as happens often.

VSTS

Visual Studio Team System is one solution to the problem development teams face of keeping all of the code for their program synchronised and up-to-date. Large projects often require many people working together on code, and often overlapping. VSTS keeps all project files updated easily, improving productivity and communications and reducing the risk of buggy software being produced. Note that there are other solutions for this and similar products in the development space and it is not a brand new, unique feature, but is new to the Microsoft range. It functions a lot like Groove, if you’ve used that.

OK, I’m sold, now what?

Download

Are you technical? Like playing with code and want to check out all the new features I’ve talked about? You can get your hands on a free copy of Visual Studio Orcas Visual Studio Orcas, either as a .iso or a virtual machine image.

Not very technical? Don’t like writing code? That’s fine, you can still play with cool stuff like Silverlight from a designer’s point of view using Expression Blend, which is again a free download!