The Microsoft Visual Studio .Net development team have released Visual Studio 2008 to manufacturing. That means it will be in our hands Real Soon Now. For those of us who have been eagerly awaiting the advances made in this new version of Visual Studio .Net, this is exciting news.

First of all, there are significant language updates. Both C# and VB.NET have new language features that will increase developer performance, allow more opportunities for abstraction and code re-use and help us to write more readable code.

Linq is one of the big new features. It integrates a query language into C# and Visual Basic, allowing for writing of declarative, SQL-like queries directly into programs. These can be type-checked at compile time, unlike strings of SQL. Furthermore, this is not just for databases: you can run queries over collections of objects, XML documents and more. For databases there's another win - because you are writing in C# or VB syntax, you don't need to worry about the syntax of SQL, or which database server you are using.

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I remember back in the good old days, I was interested in computers, and I really wanted to know how they worked and how to control them. I kept wondering how people made those creative applications I used every day on the computer. I picked up a book at the library and read it. I was thrilled and the stuff it taught me. It introduced me to something I had never known before. It was called computer programming. I learned BASIC, the easiest language I know, I read it several times, from front to back. Now I wasn't sure how to use these, or how to use them on a computer, so I wrote them down on notebook paper. I made a lot of them, my own programs, and some samples from the book I was reading. Then one day my brother told me of a program called "QBasic". When I began using it, and ran my programs, I was extremely thrilled at the moment. I used it for several years, making programs as I wished. Later, Microsoft Visual Studio came out, and I used it. I installed the Visual Basic environment. I wasn't very familiar with the layout as compared to QBasic, but it seemed a lot easier to use when I got the hang of it. I was even greater impressed that I was able to make windows and forms just like the crazy killer apps of the day. I strengthened upon this, but I eventually found some boundaries to which Basic could not go...

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