So this week I got round to installing Visual Studio 2008 beta 2. After downloading the image for Visual Studio Team System, created a new virtual machine using VirtualPC 2007 and started the installer. I was working on a different machine in the time so I had all day for the install process to run.

The image I was installing into already had Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite installed, so I'm testing against a side-by-side installation.

After deselecting C++ in the list of items to be installed I was ready to go and let the installer do it's business. The installation went without a hitch, but did ask me to reboot the machine after installation. I'm going to guess this had to do with installing the .NET Framework 3.5.

Time to load up the IDE and start a new project. First thing to notice is that VS2008 supports multiple verions of the .NET Framework (currently 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 beta) and different project templates are available for different version of the .NET runtime.

Visual Studio for Database Professionals is now fully integrated into the VS Team System deployment and there are a lot more templates for Office available.

I'll be writing an article about AOL Video in the near future and I want to implement a video feed into my Outlook contact. Creating cool Outlook add-ins is really easy in VS2008 and within minutes I had my addin up and running.

Useful code snippet:

Outlook._ContactItem item = this.OutlookItem as Outlook._ContactItem;
if (item != null)
{
MessageBox.Show(item.CompanyName);
}

The snippet above shows how to access the current item from within the FormRegion control (=Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.FormRegionControl). I feel 'this.OutlookItem' should really return a managed object or interface, not a reference to a COM Callable Wrapper. Anyway, once you figure out how to cast to an interface it's very easy to access the properties of an Outlook item.