The release of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team Systems marked a major revision
to the .NET development experience. It brought us code snippets, custom project
templates, refactoring, data binding wizards, smart tags, modeling tools, automated
testing tools, and project and task management—to name just a few features.

Visual Studio 2008 builds on these tools and provides additional core changes and additions to the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). The languages have many new improvements, the Framework has a number of additions, and the tools have been significantly enhanced. For instance, Visual Studio 2008 includes such things as
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for building richer client solutions, Windows
Communication Foundation (WCF) to help build more dynamic service-oriented solutions,
and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to enable structured programming
around business processes. In addition, there are language enhancements such as the
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and team systems enhancements such as code metrics,
performance profiling, and a revised team build system. All of these tools are meant to
increase your productivity and success rate. This book is meant to help you unlock the
many tools built into Visual Studio so that you can realize these gains.