Fall In Love with Visual Basic All Over Again in Visual Studio 2008

ou undoubtedly know by now that Visual Studio 2008 was released to manufacturing in November, just in time for Christmas. It comes wrapped up with a new version of Visual Basic, which includes (among others) these great new features:

• Enhanced IntelliSense
• Snippets that Work
• Friend Assemblies
• Updated Ternary Operator
• Better Nullable Types
• Partial Methods
• Object Initializers
• Implicit Types / (Local) Type Inference
• Anonymous Types
• Relaxed Delegates
• Extension Methods

Author's Note: The list is color coded: the green items are features I love, the red items are features you should avoid, and the blue item is a feature I think you should be wary of. The section heading colors for the listed items match the list colors, so you can immediately tell how I feel about each feature.

While many of the great enhancements in the 2008 version of Visual Studio involve Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), this article focuses instead on enhancements made directly to Visual Basic 9. As you probably know, LINQ is the star of Visual Studio 2008, and Microsoft included many of the features in the list expressly to support LINQ.