I’ve been playing with VS2008 over the holiday weekend and have to say I love it. The more I dig into Linq, the more I think of all the possibilities it opens up both for rapid extensibility and ease of development. Below’s a quick example…

var userNames = from user in users
select user.name, user.email
where user.name.startsWith(”Bill”);

The compiler isn’t a sloppy JavaScript interpreter with the var label, it will discern that it’ll cast to 1..n number of class user and userNames is actually cast as such, and not left in type variant. After that it looks a lot like SQL script, but there’s more to it, but will let you find that out for yourselves. You can even use Excepts and Unions and Intersections - dealing with collections and dictionaries has simply never been easier (or faster).

Given the tight timetables we so often wind up having to face, having this new tool in the arsenal is going to help tighten up turn around times even moreso than before.

Importing projects from prior versions of VS happen very smoothly (it does prompt you to upgrade the project to the latest version - and as with the last time around, once the project has been updated you won’t be able to go back to open it again with the last version). However one way around that is to make a copy of the project file first, then you can use that file to open the solution with the older Studio version once the original has been taken over by 2008. The actual project files themselves aren’t changed at all with just the update, and both my personal projects as well as work projects were all able to build under 2008 without a single line change (woot).

Will post more thoughts as I get along further into it all.