Visual Studio Next Generation

Microsoft's next generation of Visual Studio has been unveiled and promises to make Windows DNA development even easier. The new version simplifies the development of internet based applications by offering shared HTML, XML and CSS editors, Web Forms, Web Services, and improvements to the existing Visual languages. Web Forms are part of ASP+, and consist of a HTML page that contains the visual representation, and a source file that handles event notifications. The source is pre-compiled on the server and together the source and HTML page produce a HTML 3.2 compliant page that is sent back to the browser. The source file can be in any language and holds all the business logic, while the HTML page should be purely visual. This enforces the multi-tier approach in Windows DNA programming, and enables changes in either logic or presentation to be implemented easily. Web services are pre-compiled objects that reside on the server, and that use SOAP to publish the available functions. Once you add a web service reference to your project, Visual Studio will retrieve the XML that describes the service and its available functions enabling you to plug the service into your project quickly and easily. Web services are called through a SOAP interface that uses URLs to describe the location of the service, its name, and any parameters required for the given function call. The returned data is sent back via XML over HTTP. Creating and using web services in Visual Studio is extremely simple, and by using XML to describe the interface to the services they can be dropped into any Visual Studio project no matter what the language. On the language side of things, Visual Basic finally moves closer to being a real Object Oriented Language. With the introduction of inheritance, polymorphism, and overloading VB has matured. Also slated is free threading and structured exception handling. Oh, and you can now declare and initialise variables in one step:

Dim a as integer = 10

Visual C++ has not been ignored either. Attributed programming promises to make development of COM+ components more intuitive, while reducing the amount of code needing to be written. ATL Server has also been introduced, which is an extension of ATL and that allows C++ programmers to extend IIS with ISAPI. ATL server also makes the task of creating Web services nice 'n easy. Read more at Microsoft's Visual Studio Next Generation site.