Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 bring great new
functionality around
Web development and design
that makes building standards based, next
generation Web sites easier than ever. From the inclusion of ASP.NET
AJAX into the runtime, to new controls, the new LINQ data capabilities,
to improved
support for CSS, JavaScript and others, Web development has
taken a significant step forward.Visual Studio
2008 has incorporated a new Web designer that uses the design engine
from Expression Web. Moving between design and source view is faster
than ever and the new split view capability means you can edit the HTML
source and simultaneously see the results on the page. Support for
style sheets in separate files has been added as well as a CSS
properties pane which clarifies the sometimes-complex hierarchy of
cascading styles, so that it is easy to understand why an element looks
the way it does. In addition Visual Studio 2008 has full WYSIWYG
support for building and using ASP.NET Nested Master Pages which
greatly improves the ability to build a Web site with a consistent look
and feel.In previous versions of Visual Studio, you could only build projects
that targeted a single version of the .NET Framework. With Visual
Studio 2008, we have introduced the concept of Multi-targeting. Through
a simple drop-down, you can decide if you want a project to target .NET
Framework 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. The builds, the Intellisense, the toolbox,
etc. will all adjust to the feature set of the specific version of the
.NET Framework which you choose. This allows you to take advantage of
the new features in Visual Studio 2008, like the Web design interface,
and the improved JavaScript support, and still build your projects for
their current runtime version.