Following the release of SQL Server 2008 last week comes the final SP1 release of the following products:

• Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (133mb | TFS Installation Guide)
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (full 231mb)
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (full iso (831mb) | bootstrapper exe | readme)

You can read more about what’s in the TFS SP1 release on Brian’s blog or MSDN.

TFS improvements

A number of improvements have been made to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation including:

• Version Control
  • Simplified the user experience through cleaner “Add to Source Control” dialogs, drag and drop support to the Source Control Explorer and a much easier to use “Workspace” dialog for working folder mappings.
  • Version control now automatically supports non-solution controlled files.
  • Various changes to the Source Control Explorer such as a new checkin date/time display column, local path hyperlink support and en editable source location field.
• Work Item Tracking
  • Microsoft Office 2007 integration is now done using the standard Office “Ribbon” delivering a cleaner and easier to use integration to the different Microsoft Office 2007 products.
  • Email integration for work items and links for Team system Web Access to make it easier to use email as part of the development lifecycle.
• Visual SourceSafe migration tool
  • The migration tool has been dramatically improved through many performance and reliability improvements. SP1 provides support for the elimination of namespace conflicts, automatic solution rebinding, improves timestamp coherency and increases the amount of migration logging information available.
• Additional Features
  • Support for using SQL Server 2008 with Team Foundation Server.
  • Team System Web Access provides “live” links to work items and checkin emails. This improves the customer experience for users who do not use Team Explorer.
  • Scripting support for the creation of Team Projects.
• Performance and scalability
  • With SP1 a large part of the focus was to improve the performance and scalability of Team Foundation Server through changes such as faster synchronization with Active Directory, improved checkin concurrency, a faster way to create source tree branches, online index rebuilding for less maintenance downtime and better support for very large checkin sets.
  • Improvements in the number of projects a server can support that make not only the scalability of the server better but also the client experience when connecting to a server with a large number of projects on it.

Installation

To understand how the SP1 installer works, have a read of Heath Stewart’s blog on the topic:

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes over 250 new features and improvements to existing features, including SQL Server 2008 support. .NET 3.5 SP1 also includes many new features on which VS 2008 SP1 is dependent. Because of this, VS 2008 SP1 chains .NET 3.5 SP1 and other necessary components.

This means the complete download for VS 2008 SP1 is large - almost twice as large as VS 2005 SP1. The full beta download is about 831 MB which contains the 231 MB full redistributable for .NET 3.5 SP1. However, because of changes we made for VS 2008 SP1 the patch installs in about half of the average time it took for VS 2005 SP1. In addition, we made some additional changes we're sure you'll like.

Feedback

To provide feedback on the Service Pack, please visit https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio