Microsoft is making available to testers a first beta release of Service Pack (SP) 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and the accompanying .Net Framework 3.5.

On May 12, Microsoft made available to any/all interested parties the first beta bits for both VS 2008 SP1 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. These can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Microsoft Developer Network site. Microsoft is warning testers that there are some compatibility issues involving the VS 2008/.Net Framework 3.5 SP1 betas and Expression Blend, the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 software development kit (SDK) and Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for VS 2008.

New to VS 2008 SP1, according to Microsoft, are “new features for targeting Windows, Office, and the Web. Developers building .NET-basedapplications will enjoy improved performance in the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) designer, new components for Visual Basic and Visual C++, as well as an MFC-based Office 2007 Ribbon. Web developers will see continued improvement in the client-side script tooling including JavaScript IntelliSense.”

And new to the .Net Framework 3.5 SP 1 are “more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development.”

The .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 also both add support for the ADO.Net Entity Framework. The framework service pack also adds support for ADO.Net Data Services, and the VS 2008 one adds support for the still-in-beta SQL Server 2008 release.

Microsoft has been building an entity data model framework around its ADO.Net technology that is designed to raise the level of abraction for database programmers. Originally, the ADO.Net Entity Framework was slated to be part of Visual Studio 2008.

ADO.Net Services, the technology codenamed “Astoria,” is a RESTful interface for data. Astoria is designed to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network and across the Internet. Microsoft released a first test build of Astoria in December 2007, with officials saying the final release should be ready around mid-2008.

Microsoft officials declined to provide a target date for delivery of the final SP1s for Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5.

Source: Mary Jo Foley

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)