Gamtug, in cooperation with Microsoft Ireland, held a launch event for Visual Studio 2008, yesterday, which was February 6th, 2008. Other launch products which were covered at the event included Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The event was held at the G Hotel in Galway.
The day commenced at 1:30pm with registration, followed by a 2 hour session on Windows Server 2008, presented by the highly capable and ever interesting Dave Northey of MS Ireland. He covered the entire Server 2008 family in admirable detail, considering the 2 hour slot he had at his disposal. Items covered included…
Server Core… the new lightweight install of Windows Server. Ideal for DNS, DHCP and other Active Directory type Roles. Also, eminently suitable for cluster node Roles, as demonstrated by Dave, who, by virtue of the new Role based install model, had a 3 node failover cluster with SAN storage up and running in minutes.
Hyper-V… the new MS virtualisation hypervisor. Takes virtualisation to a new level, leveraging the Hardware Virtualisation functionality in modern processors to give close to bare-metal performance in virtualised guest OSes.
IIS 7… the newest iteration of IIS. Taking a few leaves out of the frontrunning Apache webserver, IIS now impliments a similar pluggable module structure, improving on security and performance. Also, in dumping the old binary metabase configuration system and implimenting a human readable, XML based system… again a tip of the hat to Apache, and one which might finally elevate IIS to similar levels of usage. Other features include fastcgi and result caching to give blazing performance levels in PHP apps, previously the exclusive domain of the LAMP stack.
This iteration of Windows Server will be the last of the 32 bit server OSes from MS, but since even older hardware these days is based on 64 bit processors, that shouldn’t be much of an issue. SBS is promised for later this year by insiders at MS.
The highlight of the event was the VS2008 talkthrough, presented by Ronan Geraghty. In the 2 hours allotted, Ronan managed to cover what seemed like every nook and cranny of VS2008, including a packed half hour on SQL Server 2008, from the developer prospective.
There’s a lot of new stuff to look out for, but the star of the show is LINQ, or Language INtegrated Query. This is an abstraction layer which seeks to streamline such things as data management, especially XML and SQL. In much the same way as Rails abstracts database activity with Activerecord, VS2008 does with LINQ.
On the surface, it looks much like SQL, but it removes much of the nit-picky joins and so on by using a Query By Example type structure to create a dataset to be acted on by LINQ. Ronan did a good job of explaining, and making almost exciting, something which is definitely not the stuff of dinner party conversation. Nonetheless, I do feel that LINQ will make the tedious job of data management slightly less so.
While on the topic of data management, Ronan covered the new SQL Server 2008 in some detail also. Much to get excited about here too, if datasets and such float your boat. Personally, I find data management a but of a necessary chore rather than an end in itself, but if you’re the latter type, then you’ll be very into the details of what SQL Server 2008 has to offer. As I am the former, however, the most I can offer is that it is a vast improvement in terms of security and reliability, has LINQ integration to enable reduced-pain data management and, which came as a bit of surprise to me, a spatial data type.
Spatial datatype? WTF? Well that was my initial response, but suffice to say that for the mathematically challenged SQL developer, this new datatype will allow such things as polygon-polygon intersection searches, set membership queries and all sorts of other geometric stuff that hasn’t troubled any of us since school. Nice.
There are also lots of toys for the web developers out there. VS2008 now does Javascript. Really. It also ties in nicely with IE to do proper breakpoint debugging. I know the rest of the world have had this with Firefox for a long time now, but for MS houses, this level of integration is very welcome. And Firefox isn’t exactly group policy-able either, so not every admin is going to want to have it roaming unfettered around their networks. It does a good line in CSS debugging too… all in all, things are looking very nice for the MS-centred websmith.
Other items covered included the new .NET framework, version 3.5 and the associated new build targets in VS, the apparently much easier upgrade path, the new Office Development tools and much, much more. The much abridged version of the story is that it looks really good, even for a dyed in the wool Linuxphile such as myself. The Express version is available as a free download from MS and full versions are available to trial, so go get it.
Finally, and a minor highlight in itself, the nibbles provided by the G Hotel were above the standard usually found at such things…
