Yesterday, Microsoft released the final (RTM) version of Visual Studio 2008 (codename “Orcas” until now).
As soon as I got the announcement, I downloaded it using MSDN Subscriber access in order to test it with both ViEmu and Codekana. I’ve installed it today, and I can say that both ViEmu and Codekana work perfectly fine with this.
The installer supported the betas/CTP versions so far, so if you’ve installed ViEmu or Codekana in the past few months, they will be right there the first time you start Visual Studio 2008. No hassles at all.
To my C++-accustomed enfvironment, it just looks identical to VS2005 at first sight. Microsoft has announced they’ll release a pretty big update to VS2008 in the first half of 2008, including some improvements to the native C++ compiler and to MFC. But they’re saving the best bits for the next version of Visual Studio (VS2010?), including a totally revamped C++ compiler front-end and a new code model for C++ while editing. Details are not totally clear yet, but it seems this release will finally be compelling to native C++ programmers (unlike VS2005 and VS2008, and if I may say so, even VS.NET 2002/2003 themselves!). I’ll keep watching out on what this all may mean for ViEmu and Codekana.
By the way, the MSDN Subscriber download manager has been updated, from the old but very good Windows native application… to a pretty good but ugly Java-based download manager! I was quite shocked to see the Sun and Java logos come up as soon as I clicked on the download button 🙂
If you start using VS2008 and find any glitch, just let me know by email or through the support page, and I’ll have a look into it.
