RadControls Q2 2009 source requires Visual Studio 2008

The upcoming Q2 2009 release of RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax is now built with Visual Studio 2008. As most of you know Visual Studio 2008 supports multi-targeting and we decided to exploit that feature in order to improve our productivity. Here are the main reasons of preferring Visual Studio 2008 over Visual Studio 2005:

1. The IDE provides better development experience.
2. C# 3.0 provides lots of features which do not require .NET 3.5. To name a few:
• object initializers
• using the new "var" keyword
• anonymous types
• auto properties
3. Improved compilation time.
4. Seamless change of configurations - we can easily change the .NET framework version from the project settings.

This however does not mean that you need .NET 3.5 installed in order to deploy the binaries. We fully support the .NET 2.0 runtime. Multi-targeting works as advertised and the .NET 2.0 build of Telerik.Web.UI.dll has no new requirements - you only need ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 and .NET 2.0.

.NET 3.5 is required if you want to build or debug RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax using the provided source code. Even then you don't need to install the full version of Visual Studio 2008. You can build the release version of the source using the .NET 3.5 SDK which is available as free download. For debugging you can use Visual C# 2008 Express Edition which is also free.