Challenging Visual Studio

After three month of silence I returned to my blogspot with fresh ideas. The most essential reason for this is that I was preparing special courses for our internal team and was busy with this as well as with managing our development process.

Recently I've discovered .Net framework 3.5 and Visual Studion 2008 for me. Thank God and Microsoft that irrespective to dynamic UI changes in popular Microsoft products development environment is kept conservative: It will cut down at least efforts put on getting used with new IDE.

So, what we have here:

• WPF (Windows presentation foundation) - something that can make development of UI in web and on the desktop faster and more flexible


• WCF (Windows communtication foundation) which can be used for transmitting data from one location to another


• New language features (LINQ, anonymous classes, expression trees and lambda-functions


• many features for ASP.NET


• Office and Sharepoint integration features

To some negative clues I can put following:
Reduction of Composite UI and Microsoft Enterprise Libraries. Sounds like vendor set 2nd priority for these technologies.

In next posts I'll put more attentions at the new technlogies, but right now my general conclusion after overviewing new development environment is following:
Microsoft tends to move accent to Web-development, but maintaining strong position in desktop application by providing easy passages to integrate .Net applications to the Office, Sharepoint and other business solutions