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VS.NET 2003 Delivers Solid Enhancements, Microsoft Promises Even More in 'Whidbey'
With the technical groundwork for .NET development already paved and, for many developers, traveled as well, Microsoft's attention turns now to the business of delivering the next set of productivity features.
by A. Russell Jones, Executive Editor,
Lori Piquet, Editor-in-chief
February 12, 2003
San Francisco—February 11, 2003—The timbre of VSLive! this year mirrors the uptake of Visual Studio in general; unlike the last two years, developers' minds are not focused so much on migration and the overwhelming prospect of learning an entirely new development platform and IDE, but rather on getting down to the business of becoming productive in what is now their primary development tool.
Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President of Developer Evangelism for Microsoft, spoke Tuesday morning to a crowd of approximately 2000 developers, the vast majority of whom are Visual Basic developers, to expose Microsoft's plan for future releases of Visual Studio, including:
The soon-to-be released VS.NET 2003, previously codenamed Everett
Whidbey, the subsequent release of Visual Studio, which will ship concurrently with SQL Server.NET (Yukon)
Orcas, which is slated for release with the Longhorn version of Windows
Although there are few major changes to VB.NET or C# in this release, Visual Studio 2003 gives developers numerous productivity enhancements, such as improved code completion and IntelliSense, improved connectivity for Oracle and ODBC-compliant data stores, native support for mobile device development and Compact Framework applications, additional upgrade capabilities for VB6 Web classes and user controls, and a built-in code obfuscation utility.
In addition to the Visual Studio announcements, Microsoft also announced the availability of two new public betas:
Visual Studio Tools for Office, which give VS developers an enhanced set of tools for building Word and Excel solutions using VB.NET or C#
ASP.NET Starter Kits, which are shells or templates for five common Web application types, including e-commerce sites, portals, Web-based communities, reports, and time tracking.
But, perhaps not surprisingly, what developers really seemed to respond to most during the 75-minute presentation were the live demonstrations of the new code completion capabilities. For example, if you type Try to begin an error-handling block, Visual Studio inserts the stub code for the remainder of the block:
Catch ex As Exception
End Try
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