Visual Studio 2008 Released

For all the VS fans in the house:

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008, and with it .NET 3.5. Although Microsoft has has a rash of late software releases the last few years, to their credit this one rolled out the door on time.

I haven’t tried it, but it reads like a pretty solid release. You can build applications for multiple versions of .NET, not just 3.5. You should be able to open a .NET 2.0 application, edit and build it, and deploy it on .NET 2.0 machines. That’s a big change from the brake-your-stuff VS upgrades of old. Silverlight is bundled as you might expect, as is AJAX support. They also made a new database abstraction library/object mapper called LINQ, that will make your relational database act like an object oriented database (this was probably cheaper than making an object oriented database out of SQL Server). The problems with building desktop apps for Vista in VS 2005 have been solved as well. And, of course, bug fixes, interface improvements, peace on Earth, etc.

If you’re an occasional .NET developer or you think VS Pro is overkill, you can grab the free Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions, which includes Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer. I’ve used nothing but the Expression editions for a few years now when I have to work some .NET magic (admittedly not often), and it has handled everything I’ve throw at it thus far. You can also get a 90 day trial of VS 2008 here. MSDN subscribers can download it from the MSDN subscription site.

If you just need the .NET 3.5 framework for client machines, you can grab it here.