Visual Studio 2008 introduced a lot of new features to support new technologies, adding some cool new designers to developer’s tool belt. On the other hand, support for some technologies was simply left out, leaving a some developers very unhappy. One of those was support for SQL Server 2005 BI projects (including 2005 Reporting Services).
A (long) year after its release, I learned that there was another feature dropped in VS2008 – support for designing ASP.NET mobile web forms. This doesn’t mean you can’t develop, compile and publish ASP.NET mobile forms; it simply means they pulled out the designer and mobile forms item templates out of Visual Studio 2008. Getting item templates back is the easy part, you can get them here. For the design view support, I’m not currently aware of any plans to put it back in the future. But really – with mobile browsers getting more powerful each day, capable of rendering rich(er) (x)html, do we still need the simplicity and extendibility of ASP.NET mobile forms? For the time being, the answer may still be yes, if you’re planning to support a wide range of mobile devices. Whatever the future, the current (un)support for ASP.NET mobile in Visual Studio works for me. It’s true that I’m unable to design mobile forms in design view, but I do that rarely even with their bigger brother - ASP.NET web forms.
ASP.NET? Mobile?
Strangely enough, I’m doing more web than client development lately. Go figure.
Speaking of webby/clienty things… Silverlight 2.0 RC0 was just made available. Downloads include Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Microsoft Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 Preview. Note that Microsoft Expression Blend 2 SP1 is a replacement for Expression 2.5, which is no more.
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