NOTABLE THIS WEEK - There is little question that tools these days are subject to rolling releases. Noris there much question that bosses still look for reasons to put off new migrations. Developers want to get their hands on the newest stuff so they are ready when the tools and runtimes are truly released. Managers are not always wrong in waiting until the software is more fully baked.

Well, Visual Studio 2008 went to its final debutante ball last week. The event was held in Los Angeles, and it was entitled ‘’Heroes Happen Here.'’ As Microsoft hoped, VS 2008 was rolled out along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (which, admittedly, is still something of a ‘player to be named later,’ as all of its parts did not get into the box on time for the Heroes launch.)

‘’With the launch of Visual Studio 2008,'’  CEO Steve Ballmer told the Heroes crowd, ‘’you’ll see performance again ramp up dramatically as we improve compiler speeds and developer productivity really quite dramatically. Start times, load times, compile times are all quite dramatically improved with this launch of Visual Studio 2008.'’

After a long journey the tool once code-named Orca is out as Visual Studio 2008. For some of us, the move from code name to product name is anti-climactic. For many more of us, the real game is just about to begin.

To get a gauge of where things are headed, correspondent Coleen Frye spoke to Visual Studio 2008 users, and her work is on display on SearchWinDevelopment.com. In ‘’A view on VS 2008, ‘’ a development manager at a cutting-edge Internet agency tells Frye that improvements to Team Foundation Server are among the keys that led the firm to take the VS2008 plunge. So, Ballmer’s boast of load and compile time improvements may be sound.

SearchWinDevelopment.com has been following Orca elements for a while. A clear area of interest has been LINQ, which spans both VB and C#. Check out the LINQ Learning Guide to get up to speed on this new way of working with data programmatically.

A slew of Visual Studio 2008 tips and tutorials is available as well in the site’s Visual Studio 2008 Learning Guide.

There are a lot of handy Visual Studio 2005 add-ins out there that, for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons, have yet to be updated for Visual Studio 2008.

Before you go looking for replacement add-ins, though, you might want to check out a recent blog post by Mohamed Ahmed Meligy called Tip: Try this to make a VS 2005 add-in work with VS 2008. As the title implies, the author discovered a quick process for making sure that his Visual Studio 2005 add-ins would work on the newer version of the IDE.

The caveat here, of which Meligy is quite aware, is that this process may not work with all Visual Studio 2005 add-ins. Nonetheless, it certainly can’t hurt to try it out, especially if you have come to rely on a particular add-in so much that you think it’s part of the IDE itself.

(Editor’s note: This is the first blog post by Chris Madsen, who will be writing on the .NET Developments blog from time to time. Madsen is a consultant who programs in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005. Her first few posts will cover the ups and downs of migrating from VS 2003 to VS 2005; she’ll also write about some of the Visual Studio 2005 features that surprised her. Welcome aboard, Chris!)

The other day I got the latest edition of Visual Studio magazine in the mail. Along with it came a glossy, full-color pirate’s map. Evidently, that’s how Microsoft thinks of Visual Studio 2008 — “made for the likes of developers, and other scoundrels.”

I know the calendar says 2008, but in the real world of developers, it’s barely 2005. And I’m more a captain of a leaky little fishing boat than I am a pirate. It takes everything I have to get my work out the door on time. I upgrade my tools (such as Visual Studio) when I can’t live without a new feature, not when I get glossy maps in the mail.

I’m not alone: I still see plaintive questions begging for help with VB 6 apps, and with upgrading to VB .NET. I’ll leave it to others to reveal all the cool new stuff in VS 2008. I’m going to concentrate on Visual Studio 2005, including the woes of upgrading from VS 2003.

Whenever I run across a juicy bit, I’ll let you know. These are the things they never tell you, the information that’s written between the lines in the documentation, the stuff they leave out. It’s the stuff you find after opening a hundred Google links, buried in the answer to the answer to the answer to a question on some obscure site.

Who is this “they” who never tells me stuff? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

I program mostly in Visual Basic .NET, so that’s what I’ll be talking about. I work almost exclusively with WinForms, and I’ve done a lot of work using Access, Word, and Excel in .NET apps. I love to write macros to make my life easier. I am a consultant with clients in Florida, Massachusetts and Maine. Just to keep things interesting, I live across country from all of them, in Washington State. So I might throw in some tidbits about telecommuting and consulting. Let me know if you are interested.

I’m sure I’ll write about some things you already know. Maybe they’ll make you smack your head and exclaim, “What sort of idiot is she?” But I figure if it wasn’t obvious to me, it wasn’t obvious to someone else, and that’s who the tidbit is for. I’m glad you have a better grasp of some things than I do.

But they could have told me.

Visual Studio 2008 is now available the old-fashioned way — through retail and volume licensing. The new IDE has been available to MSDN subscribers for a good two months now, and MSDN availability has expanded as well.

Microsoft’s US ISV Developer Evangelism team has a blog post about the announcement. The post also reminds readers of Visual Studio 2008’s new features and provides links to a bunch of relevant resources.

If you haven’t given Visual Studio 2008 a spin yet but intend to do so, then here are two things you may want to check out:

• Earlier this week Microsoft made available a Visual Studio 2008 product comparison data sheet, which is available as a Word doc, a PDF file or an XPS file. This will help you see what each version includes and excludes.
• Once you’ve decided which version is right for you, you can grab a free 90-day trial download of Visual Studio 2008. (Don’t forget about the free-in-perpetuity Visual Studio 2008 Express editions.)

Of course, as The Register points out, the Visual Studio 2008 release, coupled with the recent SQL Server 2008 delay, means that the upcoming Microsoft launch event in Los Angeles is even less important than originally intended — which is not at all to say that the VS team should be chided for getting the retail version out a month ahead of the launch event.

In its first incarnation, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) did not support custom validators with transport-level HTTP security. That changed with .NET Framework 3.5. But how do you make it happen?

In a recent blog entry, Phil Henning discusses use of Custom UserNamePassword Validators in .Net Framework 3.5. He notes that the scenario is only supported under self-hosted services.

Henning describes how to create a validator, as well as how to configure a service. By configuring your service using transport security and the Basic clientCredentialType, he notes, and authentication header will be protected by SSL.