Visual Studio 2008 released!

Hot off the presses, you can get it now from MSDN subscriber downloads or the trial version.  See Soma's blog for more details on the new features, etc. 

Surprisingly, being a WF and BizTalk guy, I'm least excited about the WF/WCF integration.  I'll talk more about what I dislike later, but this is a happy post!  I'm jazzed about the new web models in WCF if only because it provides a nice affirmation of the extensibility of WCF.  I might not like all of the details of how they have accomplished things, but the CSD team has certainly shown that WCF is a solid platform with all the extensibility hooks you need. 

I'm also excited to spend some time with LINQ now that I'll have the bits on my main PC (I have only put the beta on VMs or my secondary machine in my office).  Like everyone else, I've done the simple examples to get some data out of a database and bind it to a UI, but I really want to dig in and see how it works after I have some code written and want to change something in the database. I want to see what the visual modeler/designer can and cannot do, and how using XML files might benefit me more than using the simple path that is there in V1.  

The main thing that really sells this, and some folks don't know this, is that VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, build on the existing .NET 2.0 framework.  So, it should be close to a no-brainer for organizations to upgrade because they can still build their 2.0 applications without having to worry about using 3.5 assemblies if they use the multi-targeting correctly in VS / MS Build.  That's right, there are only additive changes and bug fixes in 3.5 and it uses the same 2.0 runtime that you are using today.  So there should be no issues with breaking changes to core things like datasets and remoting like there were moving from 1.1 to 2.0.  I'm upgrading all my boxes to take advantage of the new features and perf improvements.  The only reason I could see for not updating is if you have other tools like BizTalk or Commerce Server that depend on the 2005 version.  Then you can run both side-by-side, and maybe strip out some of the tools from 2005 that you no longer used to free up some space on your hard drive.   

So, download, enjoy, and happy coding!