Developing For .NET

I am travelling home today, but in between flights I am checking into a few items. First of all, and yes I know most of you are saying “Duh!”, I am checking out MSDN Subscriptions for the first time. See, when we started learning .NET we did not know if it would stick for us not, so the idea of committing to a subscription just wasn’t in the cards. Now, two versions of VS later I think there is no question that we are in .NET to stay.

I’m still waiting for VS2008 to RTM before I download it, but this way I can do it without waiting for CDs or anything like that (not to mention all the other code I get access to). The Visual Studio Professional version of MSDN is $1199 with an annual renewal of $799. Again, a no brainer.

I’m also looking at Microsoft Expression Blend. Preview 2 is out, and supposedly when it goes RTM it will be available on MSDN as well. I think I will go ahead and download the free tria now that XAML makes a lot more sense to me.

So, I have begun detoxing and will be employing these new goodies as soon as possible.? There are a million things floating about in my head.? I actually fell asleep last night thinking of a new WPF layout for a small internal database I started last week. I haven’t been this excited about coding in a long time: thank you Microsoft!