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If you are not familiar with the Microsoft Development Stack, Visual Studio is the IDE of choice for developers of C#ASP.Net, etc. I’ve been playing with Visual Studio 2008 for several weeks now and am still amazed at the improvements and enhancements over previous versions. Here are nine reasons why VS2008 rocks and why it’s worth switching to .NET (talking to you PHP guys out there).

1. Built in AJAX support and drag-n-drop AJAX Controls

2. LINQ (Language Integrated Query) - RubyOnRails-ish Entity Class creation allows for much easier and efficient data interaction using any data types, ie SQL Server, XML, JSON, etc

3. Improved HTML and rich CSS support with validation and intellisense. Finally there is support for those of us Microsoft developers who are just as much standards web developers as we are code monkeys

4. New ListView control. Another finally - a data bound control that doesn’t use tables! Now I can quit writing my own controls that render nice semantic data definition and unordered lists.

5. Built-in Silverlight support. Silverlight is some amazing technology that shouldn’t just be written off by you anti-Microsofties. It is the future of RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Oh, and it’s cross-platform - Windows, Mac, Linux.

6. Javascript Intellisense, Debugging, and Syntax Validation. Intellisense, if you didn’t know, is a developer’s best friend. VS2008’s JS intellisense not only works as you are writing your own JS, it works with external JS libraries, like jQuery, Prototype, YUI, etc. And if you have ever worked with Javascript you know it’s a pain in the arse to debug, but I guess if you are a PHP developer it doesn’t matter because that’s worse. Anyway, if you are familiar with debugging in Visual Studio (which is an amazing feature if you’ve never had the opportunity to use it) it works the same with Javascript.

7. Native Support for IronRuby and IronPython

8. Nested Master Pages. If you aren’t familiar with ASP.Net 2.0 web development, Master Pages are like templates. In the latest version you can nest multiple templates, which is a much anticipated feature because currently you need to create separate Master Pages for each change of layout within an application.

9. Improved Designer -> Developer workflow using tight integration with Microsoft’s new designer suite - Expression.

If you are interested you can start downloading free tools and betas.

Tags: ASP.Net, Visual Studio 2008, Web Development

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