We are very excited about .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and what this update means for developers who use ADO.NET for data development. This beta marks the entry of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services (aka project Astoria) as part of the overall .NET/Visual Studio beta install...

Since posting on the topic of design-time and runtime connectivity to pre-release versions of SQL Server 2008 on the Data blog in November, the set of affected clients (applications, runtimes, and operating systems) have been officially released: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft .NET Framework...

Testing has identified some issues connecting to versions of SQL Server 2008 from applications using the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 or developers using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008. These connectivity issues should be considered before upgrading any end-user systems to Vista SP1 Beta or Windows...