They're releasing it early?

Vista was late, and look what a mess it is.

For the love of humanity, delay it until it's really ready.

Although I've developed for MS operating systems for 20 years starting with Quick C on DOS, these last couple of years I need to target more than just XP & Vista as I really don't see the monolithic Windows platform any more in my line of work. Cross platform C++ is what I do now, and while VS2005 showed real improvements in standards conformance it's a dog. VS2008 seems no better and adds nothing I can use. C++ is clearly of no interest to MS any more as they dumb down their tools.

Now XCode 3 is sufficiently impressive that I went and bought a Mac. And a Macbook too. What an eye opener that has been.

If it's not ready, there is no reason to use the word "delay". A delay is when something that is ready does not arrive on time. A train, a plane, a boat, a taxi, all can be delayed.

Software is NOT delayed. It has to be finished first.

I installed beta 2 and thought 'wow! JS intellisense and integrated CSS layers', then most of the websites I'd been working on in VS2005 failed dramatically...

Turns out that the Beta install had royally screwed my IIS settings and I had to uninstall VS.2008 AND IIS to get them working again...not impressed...

Oh and it kept hanging and crashing periodically, but I'm kinda used to that with 2005 :-)

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

Of course, for those of us who do target "just" Windows (i.e. the ones at whom this article is aimed), this is a very welcome announcement. VS2008 is a massive, massive improvement on VS2005 in almost every way, and the C# 3.0 compiler enhancements (which will still produce .NET 2.0 assemblies) can't come soon enough for me.

Plus, the Professional edition of VS2008 includes the integrated unit testing, instead of it being limited to the Team System edition.

VS2008 - is about WWF WCF these are the goodies that we are really waiting for! WWF is one of the biggest advantages to enterprise development on the windows platform!

Externalisation of business rules and logic into a workflow that can be executed and then logically packaged into a DSL for business analysts and system analyst [old titles but that what they really are] to play with and then get to a working version of the business processes is going to help many projects succeed - by doing what we are asked to do - create software in a world of change to time and budget.

Forget all the new features and .NET crap, have they fixed any of the vast quantities of bugs that makes VS2005 such a pain in the arse to use for native C++ on Win32 and WinMobile?

"VS2008 - is about WWF WCF these are the goodies that we are really waiting for! WWF is one of the biggest advantages to enterprise development on the windows platform!"

please explain to me WTF wrestling has to do with dev???

does pressing F5 summon stone cold to DDT your boss, or the undertaker to tombstone the designers???

do you get to choose which wrestler comes with the license?

do you get tag teams with the team edition??

(i know its WWE now, and it was WCW but bugger it, i care not!)

'WWF', in this case, stands for 'Windows Workflow Foundation'

People watch NASCAR races for the crashes.

Vista is a huge accident. That MS would continue to race its products around the track at break-neck speeds -- hurtling toward the ugly pile-up that is Vista -- is testament to its blindness.

If Visual Studio 2008 is intended to help them fix their Vista disaster, then it, too, will fail.

It will turn the last corner and pile into the twisted metal, broken dreams, burning ambitions, and rising black smoke of dropping share prices that is Vista. If MS is willing to sacrifice its development environment to a broken and horrid operating system, what should the advocates and adherents to Visual Studio do?

I, for one, am already developing in Java. It's a step back, but it's better than burning alive in a disaster not of my own making.

I wish and hope for a Visual Studio that works. I wish and hope that MS will abandon Vista. I like the MS server OS far above any other. XP was the ideal office desktop OS.

Vista is evil and twisted. It is corrupted from the box and it cannot be wholly redeemed. What price Vista? All of Visual Studio and its developers, too, Bill?