So looking forward to another year in Visual Studio, and this year in Visual Studio 2008 no less! 

I thought I'd open 2008's blog posts with a note about what is in my toolkit at the moment for developing in VS2008.  So in no particular order...

What is in?

• Visual Studio 2008.  I played with it since Beta1, and blogged about it a bit too.  Living in the RTM now and quite liking it.
• Refactor! Pro and Coderush from Developer Express are still on my list.  There is a new version (3.0.5 at time of writing) out that has some cool new improvements.
  
• Aptana Studio.  I heard about this Eclipse-based IDE on the Hanselminutes podcast and had to check it out.  There are some good features in there for CSS and JS.  Worth having around and they cram a lot of IDE into a tiny space!
• The PowerShell Visual Studio Templates.  Powershell is getting more and more use in my life, and I love the idea of rolling your own cmdlet (pronounced:  "command-let") to manage your own apps.  The page says they are for VS2005 but they are good for VS2008 as well.
• NMock.  I know there are plenty of mocking frameworks out there each with their own style.  I just happen to like NMock.

What is out?

• The notable exclusion from my 2008 dev environment is NUnit.  I have been a fan and user of NUnit for some time, but am going with the MSTest-based unit testing framework that is built in to Visual Studio 2008.
• NAnt is on thin ice in my environment too in favour of MSBuild.  This is largely for pragmatic reasons, there is project information kept in both the VS Solution and in the NAnt file and my preference is to maintain it in one spot only.

And that's it!  I like to keep it light.  For Continuous Integration I am using CruseControl.NET.

I'm still searching for the perfect XPath/XSLT environment.  Visual Studio is OK for the moment, but I have a feeling that the perfect tool may just be Eclipse based :)