10 Reasons to Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008

At the beginning of this week, Microsoft made one more definitive step towards the Global Launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on February 27, 2008, with the release to manufacturing of its latest version of the Visual Studio development suite. Although the final product is not scheduled to become available until the end of February of the coming year, MSDN subscribers can already grab it in tandem with the .NET Framework 3.5. Visual Studio 2008 is tailored on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn, and Microsoft even provided a list of incentives designed to convince developers to jump on the
latest edition of VS.

"We put together a great document called the Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008, which I’d encourage developers to take a look at – and that’s really just the beginning of what this release offers. Visual Studio 2008 delivers over 250 new features, makes improvements to existing features including performance work on many areas, and we’ve made significant enhancements to every version of Visual Studio 2008, from the Express Editions to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)," revealed S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.

The "Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade" resource is available for download via this link and offers developers Microsoft's own perspective over the relevance of Visual Studio 2008. According to the Redmond company, Visual Studio 2008 will enable developers to: "work with data in a unified and integrated way; work with user interface designers, employ the latest web user interface techniques, build stunning applications for Windows Vista, build higher quality applications with integrated unit testing, enjoy great support for designing web applications, build applications that run on multiple versions of the .net Framework, build Office-based applications, use workflow and communication tools, and benefit from performance and stability across the board."

Blu-ray Beats the Crap Out of HD DVD

Yes, folks, the ongoing battle between the two competing next-gen DVD formats is far from over and it seems that the scales are slowly tipping in favor of Sony's little Blu-rayed baby, as the latest figures released by the Blu-ray Disc Association show a huge gap between the two formats,
although just in a specific domain, that of recorders.

Thus, according to the figures provided by market research firm GfK, it seems the Blu-ray has really KO'd HD DVD, at least as far as DVRs are concerned. Thus, in the week ending on November 11th, just 2.8 per cent of them were HD DVD units. The remaining 97.2 percent were, as expected, Blu-ray devices (while the previous weeks were not exactly a lot better, Blu-ray reaching a percentage of around 98.7 at some point).

Although these figures might seem to be pretty unfavorable to the HD DVD side, the truth of the matter is that there a few reasons why this situation was to be expected. First of all, the number of Blu-ray based DVRs is a lot larger than that of their HD DVD-powered counterparts. Then, the research was carried out in Japan, where Sony's format is a lot more popular than Toshiba's, partly due to the increasingly higher popularity of the PS3 (although this is quite a strange situation, especially since both next-gen DVD formats are of Japanese origin).

Will these figures affect the future of the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray war? Well, it's not very likely, especially since, the "old" DVD is still going pretty strong (it still accounts for around 80.2 of the sales of recording units, compared to just around 19.8 for the next-gen devices) and it will take quite a lot of time for these two new competitors to dethrone it.