Tuesday at the VSLive conference in Austin, TX, I presented a session on Visual Studio 2008.  This was an all-demo session, but some of the demos required some prepared code, so you can grab that code, as always, from my Google Code SVN repository.  If you don’t want to checkout the trunk, you can grab the zip file that’s available on the right hand side of the home page “vslivedemos.zip”.

One of the really interesting features in 2008 is the cool javascript help: from intellisense to enhanced debugging, the entire javascript experience has had an overhaul, and with as much AJAX and general scripting folks do in web applications, this will be a great help.  Heck, even for the simple stuff, it’s nice to have javascript intellisense in the IDE. 

Another little known feature of VS 2008 is XSLT debugging.  Hopefully you don’t do too much custom XSLT, but I remember doing it and trying to figure out what what missing when it just wouldn’t do what I wanted.  Now we can set breakpoints both in the XSLT file as well as the Xml data file and examine what is going on while the transformation is happening.

Downsides of VS 2008.  Same boring Refactoring menu.  There was a bunch of buzz around VS  2005 and refactoring, but they pretty much ignored it for 2008.  Shame.   Resharper continues to be a staple in my toolbox.

MSTest has now been brought to the developer sku, not just for Team edition for this release.  How much does that matter?  Not much given that it still has major shortcomings that make NUnit still come out on top.