Hands on: Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, which it says is close to feature-complete. The full version is promised before the end of 2007.

It’s a significant product, if only because most Windows development is done with Visual Studio ­ whether the free Express editions or the high-end Team Suite.

So what’s new in this version? At a language level, there’s Language Integrated Query (Linq). It is a confusing subject, but Microsoft claims, with some justification, that it makes programming easier.

WPF adoption
Next, there is proper support for Windows Presentation Foundation, the new XML-based user interface for Windows. The XML language behind WPF is called XAML. WPF was introduced along with Windows Vista at the end of 2006. It improves on the old Win32 API in many ways, though it is less efficient. In particular, it is better for integrating multimedia, scales well for different sizes and resolutions, and is more designer-friendly when you want a highly customised user interface.

WPF has not been widely adopted to date, for various reasons. First, it has high system requirements, requiring at least Windows XP with .Net Framework 3.0, and WPF applications tend to be memory-hungry. Second, there was no true WPF support in Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2008 corrects that, though it does not fix the high system requirements

In fairness, my quick tests show that a WPF application is only a little worse than a Windows Forms application in terms of memory usage, though these are also notorious memory hogs. It is also possible that Microsoft will improve performance in the final release of Visual Studio 2008, which includes an update to the .Net Framework version 3.5.

WPF applications are a refreshing change from the standard Windows look and feel, and seem to encourage more effective visual designs. A recent sample application called Family.show illustrates this (pictured above).

This genealogy application looks more like a Flash movie than Windows software. The controls are customised, the visuals are strong, complete with shadow effects, it scales well when you resize the main window, and it makes heavy use of the mouse. The application offers a viewport onto a large virtual canvas, which you explore by scrolling and zooming. There is probably nothing that could not be simulated in Win32, but it would take more effort to do so.

A snag for the graphically challenged is that you cannot code an application such as Family.show without design skills. WPF is supported by the Expression design tools, especially Expression Blend, which is the XAML designer. The same project files can be opened in both tools.