Microsoft has just released VS2008 (code named Orcas) last week. And already there are many blogs around there discussing its new features. And I guess I'm such a sucker when it comes to Beta products.

I've just finished downloading the DVD image yesterday. I started downloading it on Friday (12hrs downloading time on 100kbps download rate). The package is quite huge (3.5 GB). It took me 1.5 hours to uninstall VS2008 Beta 1 and the MSDN that came with it. Installing the Beta 2 just consumed an hour of my time including the extraction of the DVD image.

Well, now that I have finished installing the software, it's time to test it. The IDE loaded much faster this time and believe it or not, the environment is much responsive compared to VS2005. I really haven't encountered much bugs in Beta 1 so there's nothing that I can check. What I did was started out my new project on my new IDE. My new project requires me to use ASP.Net Ajax 1.0. So I went ahead and installed the package. I tried creating a new project and viola! I noticed that there is no project template for ASP.Net Ajax! Though I've read in a blog that if you choose .Net Framework 3.5, the files needed for ASP.Net AJAX will automatically be included. But I don't want to have a dependency to a 3.5 Framework! All I want is to be able to create ASP.Net Ajax solution using my old and tested .net framework 2.0.

But alas! With the power of live.com I found a blog post by the Ajax team from Microsoft!

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/07/30/using-vs-2008-to-target-asp-net-ajax-1-0.aspx

I followed the instruction to be able to use ASP.Net Ajax 1.0 on .Net framework 2.0 projects in VS2008. Tried it once, twice and Grrrr.... it won't work!!! I've just read the comments and it seems that some other guys are experiencing the same problems as mine. Hmmm... Well I guess this is the price on using Beta softwares. If your planning to use VS2008, good luck to you!