Tim Mackey's Weblog

Just got up and running with VS 2008 Beta 2 and converted my Orcas Beta 1 projects over to VS 2008.  have a read of Scott Gu's post on downloading and installing.  whaddya know? VS 2008 hasn't crashed yet :)  seriously though, this is a major relief to see good stability.  as a developer it did my head in to have to keep nuking devenv.exe and losing a few minutes work, driving me quietly insane.  hopefully those days are over now.  Beta 1 was a thousand times better than VS 2005, but Beta 2 looks even better. 

in terms of breaking changes with upgrading projects etc., here are some tidbits i came across

• the namespace System.Data.Linq.Expressions no longer exists.  i just deleted this namespace and it worked fine, they must have moved various classes back into the root Linq namespace or something.
• if you use SqlMetal, you will have to use the new version of this tool, which i found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\V6.0A\Bin\SqlMetal.exe. The generated code from the new tool is very different to before so you will need to regenerate in order to use the new LINQ libraries.
  
• web.config changes are also introduced.  the best way to figure out the changes is to open up a blank web application and compare the standard web.config in the empty project to your own web.config.
• Crystal Reports assembly version numbers are the same with this release of VS, 10.5.3700.0, so no changes here since Beta1.

i'll post more next week when i have some real experience using VS 2008.  so far so good.  great job Scott & Co.

Update 30 July 2007 - Deployment Issues

• To deploy a VS 2008 beta 2 web application to a Server 2003 with .net runtime 2.0, you need to install 3.5 of the runtime.  i got all sorts of web.config errors due to the new syntax with beta 2.  A web app compiled against v3.5 in Beta 1 had no trouble running on top of the 2.0 runtime with the various v3.5 DLLs deployed to the /bin directory, however this doesn't seem to be possible anymore.  it took me a while to find the correct download for the 3.5 beta 2 redistributable, it installed in about 10 mins and required a reboot, and did not affect any of the v1.1 and v2 web sites running on the server.