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Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2008

Nov. 7, 2007

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Microsoft's announcement on Nov. 5 of its Visual Studio 2008 development platform reveals a Silverlight-based program for creating new Internet applications. Microsoft says these new features should greatly increase its presence in the RIA (rich Internet application) segment on the industry.

Visual Studio 2008 is an important announcement for Microsoft, taking the company deeper into the realm of Internet application development, said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with Toronto-based research firm IDC Canada.

It's a move against rivals in the RIA space, like San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc. and the open source community, but specifically, "it's a direct shot across the bow at Adobe specifically", he said.

With Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft is now essentially "playing catch up" to the other vendor offerings out there. However, given the company is the world's largest software developer, Restivo anticipates the software giant will eventually get there, sooner rather than later.

Visual Studio 2008 is the successor to Microsoft's older Visual Studio 2005, and it bundles Internet functionality that allows developers to build Silverlight and Ajax-based applications.

Additionally, ASP.Net libraries are accessible within the software.

Rini Gahir, senior product manager for Microsoft's developer platform division says "the transition to facilitate Internet application development is in direct response to an increasingly stronger view among businesses that the Internet is a key strategic channel."

Adding RIA development functionality to a commonly-used development toolkit like Visual Studio will also help leverage Microsoft's presence in the RIA space, added Gahir.

"This is definitely an area that we are taking seriously and enabling our IT developers and designers to not just build cool stuff, but Web applications that businesses are demanding," he said, adding that rich media functionality is already present across Microsoft products like Windows Vista, Live.com, and Virtual Earth.

Overall, Microsoft's advantage in any new arena is the broad array of application tools and resultant interoperability between its software, agreed Restivo. "Microsoft's advantage is that it already has the attention of the developer community. It stands to deepen those relationships by providing those developers with extra functionality."

"Particularly, Silverlight is key to those developer activities given that rich media is prevalent to say the least, and it's only going to become more important over time."

"Offering the Silverlight-based platform in the latest release of Visual Studio is a great move by Microsoft. Combining Silverlight's presentation abilities with a high-performance, cross-platform version of the .Net Framework opens up some awesome possibilities," according to software developer Chris Cavanagh.

Cavanagh thinks Silverlight's presentation abilities make the Microsoft technology a "serious challenger to Adobe's Flex and AIR." Furthermore, Adobe has yet to catch up to Microsoft's caliber of development tools, documentation and support, he said. "So it'll be interesting to see how things turn out."

Providing an Internet development platform amenable to both camps is part of Microsoft's roadmap for software development platforms, he said, adding that Expression Studio, an Internet and desktop application design suite released in August, also seeks to merge developer and designer roles.

Among other new functionality in Visual Studio 2008 is "multi-targeted support" allowing developers to build .Net applications that support .Net 2 or .Net 3, said Gahir.

The fact that the Microsoft application development technologies are ubiquitous and familiar to most developers will facilitate development and deployment of applications built in Visual Studio 2008, and therefore drive adoption of the toolkit, according to Gahir.

Besides granting developers that added Web functionality, the toolkit addresses the historically different tools and approaches that designers and Internet developers have taken toward Web application creation, said Gahir.

Additionally, the 2008 version includes LINQ (Language Integrated Query) allowing developers to more efficiently integrate Web applications with databases. Visual Studio 2008 will be available around November 27, 2007.

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Source: Microsoft