Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Released Today

 

The teams at Microsoft officially released the Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008, TFS, and the .NET Framework 3.5.  You can download the bits from MSDN or TechNet.

Although the official RTM announcement was made today, some of the release bits actually shipped with the SQL Server 2008 RTM which was released 5 days earlier.  If you downloaded SQL Server 2008 prior to today, and already had Visual Studio 2008 installed, you may have encountered some issues during the setup.  You might have also noticed that Visual Studio 2008 RTM had a few issues connecting to SQL Server 2008.  The SP1 should address these compatibility issues and bring both platforms up to speed.

So what's new in this SP1 for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio:

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data - data scaffolding and quick automated, template-driven CRUD web sites
• ADO.NET Data Services - query you sql server data store using REST-based URIs.
• ASP.NET Routing Engine - map incoming URLs to route handlers for "beautiful" URLs on your web applications (oh and REST, too)
• Improved AJAX script support for browser history (back/fwd buttons), and script combining for fewer (and cacheable) script resource requests to the web server
• Vast performance improvements to the Visual Studio 2008 designer and better Intellisense support for javascript, classic ASP, etc, WCF refactorings, etc.
• New WindowsForms controls, and significant WPF performance improvements (hardware acceleration)
• WCF scalability improvements and support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
• Team Foundation Server improvements

plus...improvements to VB and C# and much more!!!

This SP1 provides a ton of new features, fixes, improvements and enhancements, and makes it well worth the download.

For more details and a more exhaustive list of what's new, check out Scott Guthrie's blog post on the  pre-release version.  Also, check out Brian Harry's post on today's release with more details on the TFS bits.

SQL Server 2008 Released!

Yesterday SQL Server 2008 released (exactly 30 days from my post about it being on the horizon).
You can read the official press release here.

Robert Bruckner, from the SSRS product team, blogged about the release and some of the new features in SSRS.

I'll be testing out the RTM this weekend, while wrapping up my last chapter on the Wrox book on SSRS. I'll definitely put out a post about my favorite new features in SQL Server (not just SSRS)....although I can already tell you that I LOVE the Intellisense support for T-SQL within Management Studio...that is da bomb!

Go get your copy from MSDN or TechNet! And let's hear some comments and feedback.