The next chapter introduces Visual Studio 2008, including an overview and walkthrough. In the integrated development environment of Visual Studio, you can develop managed code in a variety of languages. It is an environment for creating secure, robust, enterprise, tested, and scalable applications. In addition, Visual Studio hosts a variety of rapid application development tools that facilitate the quick and painless development of managed applications.

Visual Studio 2008 includes several enhancements. Improved testing capabilities have been added. A suite of testing tools is available now in the Professional edition of the product. Multi-targeting of .NET environments has been added. It is now simple to compile an application to different versions of the .NET environment. There are new refactoring features as well. These and many more enhancements make Visual Studio 2008 the preferred tool for developing managed applications.