Read here about how Microsoft paid Visual Studio "debt."
Dino Chiesa, Microsoft's director of marketing for .Net, said Microsoft's push to improve Web development reflects the momentum around Web 2.0 and the company's investments in its infrastructure to support Web 2.0 applications.
.Net Framework 3.5 also delivers several new features, including capabilities for Web 2.0, SOA (service-oriented architecture) and software-plus-services-based applications, the company said.
A new programming model simplifies building workflow-enabled services by using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. This allows .Net Framework developers to build business logic for a service using Windows Workflow Foundation and expose messaging from that service using WCF.
Microsoft also has placed additional Web services protocol support in WCF, including Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) 1.1, WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1, WS-SecureConversation and Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination) 1.1.
"It's incredible the depth and breadth of the platform we already had, and we've taken that and made it more useful for the Web 2.0 space," said John Shewchuck, a Microsoft distinguished engineer in the company's Connected Systems Division. "We're really taking all of .Net and making it the best-in-breed tool for targeting Web 2.0 applications."
Visual Studio 2008 also features multitargeting support.
"VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .Net Framework," said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog post on Nov. 19. "This means you can use VS 2008 to open, edit and build existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 applications (including ASP.NET 2.0 applications using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0), and continue to deploy these application on .NET 2.0 machines.
Guthrie also noted that Microsoft plans to add some plug-ins for Visual Studio 2008, including one supporting the company's Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform for creating rich Internet applications.
"Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release," Guthrie said. "These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio. Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks."
Meanwhile, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, in a blog post on Nov. 19, said: "When I look back over the last few years at how we were able to ship these two products, I truly believe that both our customer input and our renewed focus on intentional engineering allowed us to release a great product in the timeline that we originally set out to hit. We adopted Team Foundation Server to manage this release and to collect data and enable reporting on our progress. It was incredibly helpful to me personally to be able to view our progress in real time."
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