Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

Microsoft's development group has released beta 2 of visual studio 2008 as well as the framework update (version 3.5), also the RC update of Silverlight and an update of the Ajax Control Toolkit for VS2008, (not to mention the August update of expression's blend2). With all this we are getting closer and closer to the final update of the development tools and following the trend of the last months (years) they are not only corrections of some bugs, it is a whole new way of facing development problems with tools like LINQ, WWF, WCF and above all Silverlight and WPF that will surely change the way we understand the user experience on the internet.

All the geeks who are connected with scott guttie and his development group have already seen installation instructions and procedures, but for those who prefer it in Spanish and step by step here is the step by step to set up my test machine on VS2008 and other new bits.

Note: I did all this in a virtual machine running Windows 2003 server, I highly recommend doing this so as not to have problems with the machine of “production” in which you are currently developing, although all the installations are side by side compatible it is the best and safest practice. (It is also possible to download the virtual machine already installed with everything on the same VS2008 site.)

Then:

1. I uninstalled Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1, MSDN and Visual Studio express that I had on that machine, I also uninstalled acropolis.

2. On the Silverlight site I downloaded the RC version Alpha 1.1. update for developers, the installation is very simple and smart and left my machine on the latest available version., Download the Silverlight Alpha.

3. Thanks to Ivanov from Microsoft Colombia I had access to the DVD with the 3.5 gigas of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, thanks buddy!! 🙂

4. For those who do not have that fortune there are two ways, the first for those who are not behind firewalls:

a. Install Microsoft Secure Content Downloader

b. Select Visual Studio Pro SKU from the list and tell it save as…

5. For those who are behind a firewall they must use the page of Microsoft VS2008 Beta 2 where they can download it by installing a smart downloads add-on for IE7 or they can do a normal http download (I do not recommend the latter they are 3.5 gigas). They can download the ISO image of the DVD or the files there are the Team Sytem, Professional versions, etc.

6. I installed Visual Studio 2008 Team System Beta 2, I selected the full version, I had no problem in the installation although it took a while but I think it is more because of my virtual machine.

7. After Installing you must run a script that you can download from here: Run this file post installation. , this is very important because it allows having Ajax projects with framework 2.0 (the ones you are doing now) and also projects with Framework 3.5, without running this file you will have the following problem: when opening the current ajax project a reference will be established with framework 3.5 that will make it mandatory to install this version of the framework on the machine where the project is installed. (Unlike other versions of VS like 2005 and 2003 VS2008 allows developing projects for any version of the framework, but that will be a topic for another blog).

8. Now, if your machine ever had some beta installed go to the VS2008 command line window in VS2008 tools, and run the following command “DevEnv /resetsettings” (this should only be done once and it is important because it guarantees the adequate performance of the new web editor included with VS2008).

With this you can now create new projects or load the current ones in Visual Studio 2008, in a quick exploration of features just in the creation of projects you can see the option to create projects for different frameworks (Top right of the create project window), you will also find the WCF and WWF type projects without having to install additional add-ons (and yes, it knows it cannot create WCF projects for Framework 1.1). The Acropolis projects (new version of Windows Forms for WPF) deserve their own blog and one of the best things: the Visual Studio Team System tester projects are included, I don't know if this will be like this in the final version but it should be, the test projects are too important for them to be left out in another version of visual studio.

Now, if what you want (like me) is to create applications for the internet with the latest available technology you cannot fail to install the following:

1. Expression Blend 2 August Preview

2. Silverlight Tools Alpha for VS2008.

I hope it is helpful.

Juan Carlos Peláez
MCTS

Member of the Microsoft Speaker Group Andino

Member of the Microsoft Influencers Group of Colombia.

Keywords: VS2008 Beta 2, VS2008 Installation, Juan Peláez, .Net, Visual Studio, Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, Installation Instructions