The major version has officially rolled in the development environment. Manage 2000 8.0 here we come. Whoo Hooo!!!
The development team decided a couple of months ago that with all the mobile web changes plus other un-celebrated technology changes that the 7.x branch should end with 7.3 and the upcoming release should begin the 8.x dynasty. Look for it towards year-end of 2013.
So now that changing the numbering is done, it is time to change some more of the machinery as well. I am currently hip deep in ASP.NET 4.5, HTML 5, and VS 2012, trying to solve too many equations with way too many unknowns.
The VS 2012 IDE has a lot to be said for it. It feels faster, and seems to get confused less often by our sub-project pattern web architecture. The solution explorer drill down into project classes, the highlighting of the current variable in neighboring code, the javascript highlighting during edits are all wonderful developer productivity improvements. There is a project level option to run a code analyzer at compile time that functions much like the Manage 2000 BX Audits to provide developers with coding standards compliance feedback.
We are going to have to make a few mass changes to vbproj files and a few references in aspx and ascx files. Infragistics references will have to target ASP.NET 4 instead of 3.5. But it doesn't seem like the Visual Studio Tools Team broke anything critical to Manage 2000 this time around. Whew!
There is an interesting convergence of client side technology happening as Manage 2000 web tools provide lots of client side javascript and JSON validation and editing features which run into some of the unobtrusive validation being supplied with VS 2012 and ASP.NET 4.5 with the inclusion of jquery. And as we proceed down the HTML 5 path we are both running into the validation constraints being coded natively into browsers as they process HTML 5 markup. So it seems I will be spending some time trying to smooth over some redundant repetition of validation on the client end.
