Welcome to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Programming. This is a book about doing software development with Microsoft’s latest development studio—Visual Studio 2008. All code samples in the book were built with either Visual Studio 2008 Professional or Visual Studio Team System 2008. We’ve been using Visual Studio 2008 in production since its first beta versions, and will probably continue to do so for quite some time. In this book we have covered a number of what some people would consider to be rather disparate or strange topics, such as Active Directory and XSLT. We have covered topics that are important and useful to developers, but that many developers are either unaware of or just haven’t looked at yet.
Visual Studio 2008 leverages new functionality available in. NET Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 3.5, but can target .NET Framework 2.0, too. This is of enormous benefit when developing and deploying applications; we can use the latest and greatest tools to develop our applications, but can deploy them to computers that aren’t necessarily running the latest versions of everything. This means far fewer headaches for developers and support staff. Visual Studio 2008 can also target different processor architectures. From the same interface we can compile an application to target 32-bit x86 processors, 64-bit x64 processors, or 64-bit IA64 processors. This can sometimes be an ultimate quick-fix for applications with high memory usage.
Processor manufacturers these days have effectively stopped producing “faster” processors and have opted instead to produce processors with an ever-increasing number of cores. This presents an amazing opportunity that has largely been left untapped by application developers. Applications that don’t “do” multithreading are potentially wasting an enormous amount of processing power. So in this book we also cover multithreading. While multithreading is not a feature or technology specific to Visual Studio 2008, it’s something that you’ll really want to implement in your own applications, and we show you how using Visual Studio 2008.
Another technology often overlooked (avoided?) by developers is Active Directory (AD). If you’re developing Windows (or web) applications in a corporate environment, then chances are you’re connected to AD. This is a great directory service built by Microsoft that unfortunately is underutilized. Engineers very often view AD as the thing that needs to be installed on Windows servers before they can provide domain support. On the other hand, developers generally don’t view AD at all. AD is actually a very efficient data store in its own right, providing support for the creation of millions upon millions of objects with a myriad of properties based on complex data types. You can even extend AD objects and add your own properties to them.
Our goal in this book is to present tools and concepts that perhaps you didn’t know about or hadn’t the time to look into, and that will expand your horizons as a developer. Soon you’ll be writing multithreaded, AD-aware database tools to produce XML result sets and transform them with XSLT into XHTML for users to digest.