Top 10 reasons to use Visual Studio 2008

VS 2008 and .NET Fw make it easy for development organizations and developers of all skill levels to build software and services on the latest platforms including the web, windows vista, the 2007 Office system and Windows Server 2008.

VS 2008 delivers over 250 new features, makes improvements to existing features including performance work on many areas.

Some are:
- New Visual Designers: Integrated designers for .NET FW 3.5 components such as WPF, WF and WCF. Powerful unit-testing tools are now integrated directly into Visual Studio Professional.
- Workflow enabled services: Building connected applications is much easier with workflow-enabled services in .NET FW, enabling developers to build business logic for a service using WF and expose messaging from that service using WCF.
- Multitargeting: Developers can target the .NET FW 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5, helps to use the latest tools to maintain existing applications even as you start building new applications using the newest advances in .NET FW
- Office development: VS 2008 Professional now includes Visual Studio Tools for Office(VSTO), these built-in tools enable developers to quickly create applications that leverage the capabilities of MS Office and integrate with the world's most popular desktop productivity suite.
- Workflow with Expression Studio: Developers and designers can now share user interface assets, such as design elements and controls, with both MS Expression Web(ASP.NET) and Microsoft Expression Blend(WPF)
- Web development features: VS 2008's general improvements to Javascript coding(Intellisense, syntax check, debugging) help with writing Javascript code. Native support for web server communication techniques for AJAX/JSON-enabled websites.
- Code Annotations: With new version of Team Foundation Server, I can now determine who last changed a particular line of code and see why they changed the code as well as what work item that change is associated with.
- Continuous Integration: Another big feature in TFS is the ability to automatically generate a build whenever a programmer checks code into source control server. Added, a check-in policy that will check the state of the build and prevent further check-ins until the build is healthy.