Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on "New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005" that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers. One thing that surfaced was that device developers needed more help when it came to testing their applications efficiently. Whether that meant testing on multiple devices or under varying conditions or simply being able to write unit tests, they clearly needed help getting applications to market faster by reducing the testing time.

 Here I'll walk you though some of the new features for device developers in Visual Studio 2008, focusing on how these features will make device developers more productive by enabling scenarios that aid in testing applications and help you ship a high-quality product faster.