BANGALORE, INDIA: Visual Studio 2008 is a great development tool that leverages the cool new enhancements to the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

.NET 3.5 added a whole bunch of new features – from WPF, WCF, WF, LINQ and many other language enhancements to C# and VB. Visual Studio 2008 enabled creating WPF and WF applications using an easy to use design surface as well as enabling a ton of new functionality in web apps using ASP.NET. For instance, all new Web apps created on .NET 3.5 using VS2008 are AJAX enabled by default.

The service pack 1 just released adds on a whole bunch of new features that makes development a breeze while keeping coding consistent with established architecture design patterns and practices. For instance, the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature allows developers to create web sites that interact with databases within a matter of minutes.

However, this does not mean that these sites are built without thought about good coding practices. Instead, these use the standard Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern to ensure that every part of the system falls into the correct place for a properly architected solution.

Take for instance the addition of validation rules for columns of a table. Instead of adding validation to the page itself, you add the validation to the data model. The view (generated web page) accordingly changes to include the validation control into the page to ensure that invalid data is not entered. And all this is possible to do in a matter of minutes, unlike any of the other platforms –whether it be Java, PHP, PERL, etc.

Dynamic Data is just one of the new enhancements in SP1. You also get a standalone ASP.NET MVC website, the Entity Framework that allows mapping of databases to object-oriented entities graphically, better designers and even some new controls. With this, VS2008 and the .NET framework take a huge leap over its nearest competition and takes development to  a whole new level.