Visual Studio 2008 to ship by end of month!

In case you didn't catch this S. Somasegar announced today during his TechEd Developers Keynote in Barcelona that Visual Studio 2008 will ship by the end of this month (November!). Yeah! Most people were counting on this before the end of the year which mean December or early January so this comes as a nice surprise.

We're talking about some cool technology:

  • Visual Studio 2008 (all editions)
  • Team Foundation Server 2008
  • .NET Framework 3.5
  • Language Integrated Query (LINQ)

Now of course the best feature in Visual Studio 2008 is multi-targeting. This features allows you to continue to develop .NET 2.0 or 3.0 applications without migrating to 3.5. There are lots of great features if Visual Studio 2008 - even if you don't move to .NET 3.5:

And if you are a Team System User

  • SharePoint 2007/WSS 3.0 or MOSS support
  • Simplified Installation
  • Better Offline Support
  • A bunch of other stuff including Power Tool Rollups.

And don't worry - you can install VS 2008 side by side with VS 2005.

Don't let your VS2008 Beta2 VPC turn into a Pumpkin on Halloween at Midnight

Jeff Beehler blogs here and here that the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPCs are prematurely expiring on November 1st. If you're using your VPC for demos - you'll be limited to 2 hours before you have to shut down. If you're using it for real work - that will be annoying - especially if you are using it for your TFS server Follow Jeff's links to instructions on backing that up and moving it. Look for new VPCs next week - hopefully we'll see a Release Candidate shortly.

Update: Jeff has posted a link to updated VPCs here.

Open Space Meetings at 2008 MVP Summit

The Microsoft 2008 MVP Summit Site (https://www.mvpsummit2008.com) is now live. The event will occur April 13-17 in Seattle & Redmond Washington as usual and is for any MVP or Regional Director.

A new twist I noticed on the site is the concept of Open Space meetings...

"Highly dynamic and interactive sessions, designed based on Open Space Technology, where you’ll be able to define topics, attend, or even host"

Well that sounds really cool - a little birds of a featherish, but with some better guidance. Open Space World has an elevator speech that describes Open Space Technology meetings.

Pictures are worth a several thousand words. Check out the slideshow: