As you can read on Scott Guthrie's Blog the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta can be downloaded now. It has a amazing set of features and improvements and I highly recommend it, especially if you live on the bleeding edge :) I like the VS IDE and ASP.NET Routing Engine (previously part of the new ASP.NET MVC framework) the most.
David Hayden has summarized the list of changes (Scott's Blog posts are usually very long ^^):
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data - The wonderful ASP.NET RAD Data Scaffolding Support similar to what you get from Ruby on Rails.
- ASP.NET Routing Engine - The routing engine we have been enjoying in the ASP.NET MVC Framework and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
- ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support - What you know and love from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
- ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support
- Haven't seen this one before. It allows you to declaratively define
multiple script references within a new custom tag.
- Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor - Always good to see :)
- Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
- Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks - This will help with jQuery, cool!
- Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects
- Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging - Need this for ASP.NET MVC Framework Views.
- Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects
- SQL Server 2008 Support
- ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities - We expected this. Awesome!
- ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria") - This is awesome, too!
- C# - The C# code editor now
identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code
issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify.
Every little bit helps.
Read all this in more detail on Scott's blog or just download VS2008 SP1 Beta.
