Hey, dude, like where's my Visual Studio 2008 support?

UPDATE: DXperience v2007 vol. 3.4 (2007.3.4) has now been released with full support for VS2008 RTM, rendering this particular post moot.

In the interests of future historians though, I'll leave it up.

Well, OK, we haven't got any emails quite like that yet, but I thought I'd throw up a quick blog post to say what we're doing now that MSDN subscribers now have the RTM build of Visual Studio 2008.

The first point to make is that we got our copy of Visual Studio 2008 RTM at exactly the same time as everyone else. We have to download and install it just like you, and then we get to load our various projects (products, test code, installs, etc, etc) and compile, run, and test it all. We need to do this and do it well, otherwise you, our customers, could get some very nasty buggy code. We can't assume that just because something worked in VS2005 or in one of the betas for VS2008 it's going to work just fine in the RTM of VS2008.

So, as of this morning, we're seeing several issues.

• There's been some installation problems with Visual Studio 2008. For example, we've run into the same problems as this guy. One issue we've solved is that VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) can interfere with the VS2008 install and you need to uninstall it first. A couple of people are also reporting issues with running VS2008 and VS2005 side-by-side.
• There is some bizarre behavior in CodeRush and Refactor! Pro where Intellisense is not coming up. Got to solve that one of course. (Already solved: I was reading old internal posts.)
  
• The XtraCharts team have discovered a doozy of a problem: the WebChartControl can no longer be dropped on a form from the toolbox. (They've narrowed it down to any custom control that is implemented in two assemblies, with the same namespace used in both assemblies. If you create such a control, drop it on the form, it's created with the wrong prefix (ccl) and so is created with errors.)

And those are only the issues I've got to learn about in the last 24 hours. I dare say there have been others that have been solved without me being in the loop.

So, yes, we're working hard on getting minor releases of our products that support the Visual Studio 2008 RTM out as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more developments.

It doesn't help that tomorrow is Thanksgiving... Sigh.

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