M'soft Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released

Great news! Just found out that M'soft Visual Studio 2008 is released on MSDN. Woohoo! Congrats M'soft for yet another milestone.

The wait is finally over! No wonder over the past 2 months, the folks at Redmond are so quite. Now I understand. On Monday, Nov. 19 2007, M'soft announced that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM). With more than 250 new features, Visual Studio 2008 includes significant enhancements in every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System. Developers of all levels – from hobbyists to enterprise development teams – now have a consistent, secure and reliable solution for developing applications for the latest platforms: the Web, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office system, and beyond. (source: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx)

For the final release download links, check it out in ScottGu's blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-3-5-released.aspx). In conjunction with the release, here is a summary of the new features:

• Multi-targeting support for multiple versions of the .NET Framework
  
• ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript support
  
• Web Designer and CSS Support
  
• New ListView/DataPager controls
  
• Language Improvements and LINQ
  
• Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL
  
• Browsing the .NET Framework Library Source using Visual Studio (just get to know this additional feature)
  
• WPF designer and project support
  
• ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs for FireFox
  
• WinForms and WPF projects can use the ASP.NET Application Services
  
• Richer Office development and Visual Studio Tools for Office support is built-into Visual Studio
  
• WCF and Workflow projects and designers
  
• Faster unit testing support
  
• AJAX web testing (unit and load)
  
• Much more...
  

Unfortunately, there are two popular add-ins to VS not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release. These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha and the Web Deployment Project add-in. If you are doing Silverlight 1.1 development using VS 2008 Beta2 you'll want to stick with with VS 2008 Beta2 until this updated Silverlight Tools Add-In is available. More info at Scott Gu's blog (as usual). Also, the ASP.NET MVC Framework will come later. According to Scott, this framework will work with VS 2008 as well as VS Web Developer 2008 Express. In addition, ADO.NET Entity Framework is not ready for RTM.

There are few breaking changes between the RTM version and the beta 2 including .dbml files created with the LINQ to SQL designer, LINQ to SQL OnValidate partial method now takes an enum as an argument, instead of DataContext.Add you'll now use DataContext.InsertOnSubmit() with LINQ to SQL, and the ListView control's item placeholder is now called "ItemContainer". Upgrading projects built with Beta2 should be pretty straightforward and only take a few minutes.

There is also a new release of AJAX Control Toolkit version 3.5.11119.0 (2007-11-19) that targets the above official release of .NET Framework 3.5 and VS 2008 at http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=8513.

M'soft will publish in future the feature list per SKU.

Just finished downloading a 90-day free trial edition of VS 2008 Team Suite. Proceed with the installation now. I keep my finger cross the installation will goes smooth.