TABLE OF CONTENTS
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 | Visual Studio 2008 Products and Plug-ins |
This section of the Visual Studio 2008 Learning Guide focuses on open-source, shared-source and commercial product news. This list includes Visual Studio 2008 Shell, a stripped-down version of the IDE aimed at ISVs. After reading this section, take a deep breath -- you're done!
Orcas becomes Visual Studio 2008 and A look at Visual Studio 2008 Shell (SearchWinDevelopment.com)
Visual Studio Shell is essentially the IDE stripped down to its bare framework. The new isolated mode of Visual Studio, and its free distribution, is designed to widen the ecosystem by appealing to specialized tooling providers. The integrated mode, meanwhile, lets developers and ISVs use VS Shell as a plug-in. These two articles offer some insight into how to best leverage VS Shell.
ReFactor! Pro tops 100 refactorings, supports VS 2008 (SearchWinDevelopment.com)
Developer Express' productivity plug-ins now sport more than 100 different code refactorings, including several for Visual Studio 2008.
New Infragistics controls to support Silverlight, Ajax, VS 2008 (SearchWinDevelopment.com)
The company's NetAdvantage for WPF tool now supports Visual Studio 2008. In addition, plans were announced to support Web development frameworks like ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight.
Microsoft adds FXCop spell checker to Visual Studio 2008 (InfoQ)
FXCop, a spell check engine for the .NET Framework, will be included in Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft said. MS has used the tool internally and first included it in Visual Studio 2005 Team System.
PLINQO: LINQ to SQL extended (InfoQ)
CodeSmith's PLINQO, or Professional LINQ to Objects, is actually a set of templates for use with LINQ to SQL functionality in Visual Studio 2008. Among other things, CodeSmith's templates include a business rules engine and a manager class, both of which LINQ to SQL lacks.
LINQPad (Joseph Albahari)
This free plug-in supports three types of C# LINQ queries -- LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML. "Download LINQPad and kiss goodbye to SQL Management Studio," the author declares.
XAMLPad (Microsoft)
XAML is the code-behind language for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. The XAMLPad is a Windows SDK that serves as a visual editor for XAML code. It offers some basic text-editing commands, a visual tree for viewing the property values of content, and an auto parse and refresh mode.
