Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 released!

We released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 last November.  The feedback has been tremendously positive, but developers always have new ideas and suggestions for how we can improve the development experience for them.

Building on the base of great features in VS2008 and .NET 3.5, I am happy to announce today the release to manufacturing of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

In Visual Studio 2008 SP1 we have concentrated on improving performance and reliability. We have worked on our designers for building WPF applications and improved their performance, we have improved tools for developing AJAX applications, improved designers for working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and included a richer JavaScript development environment and a streamlined Web site deployment experience.

In the .NET Framework we went a little further.  Beyond fixing the customer reported bugs we also added some highly requested features to make it easier to develop applications for the latest platforms.  Some of these new features include the .NET Framework Client Profile, enhanced support for database application development through the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and integration with (recently released!) SQL Server 2008, and multiple enhancements to ASP.NET.

Whenever we talk to developers, one of the major pain points that they face is deployment of their .NET applications due to the time it takes to install the .NET Framework.  This is something we know we needed to work on and have delivered a great solution in SP1 with the .NET Framework Client Profile.

The .NET Framework Client Profile setup contains just those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are typically used for client application scenarios.  This reduced size framework (86.5% reduction from 197MB to 26.5MB) is the fastest and easiest way to deploy Windows applications.  The .NET Framework Client Profile also makes it possible to extend the improved download and installation experience to existing .NET applications. As an added bonus, with work done in the service pack, services connecting to .NET applications will also see up to 10 times the amount of performance improvement when running in Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0.

Continuing to focus on the development of Web 2.0 applications and dynamic Web sites, ASP.NET Dynamic Data is now offered with SP1 which provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid data-driven development without writing code.

This release also comes right in step with the recent release of SQL Server 2008.  With this service pack, Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 also support SQL Server 2008, making the Microsoft platform the most comprehensive environment for database application development.  The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 includes ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework, which raise the level of abstraction for database programming and supply both a new model-based paradigm and a rich, standards-based framework for creating data-oriented Web services.

This release of SQL Server is very important to us for the developer community and it is special in another way for me personally.  This week marks the ten year anniversary of the India Development Center which I started and continue to sponsor.  SQL Server 2008 is the first SQL release with significant in-box contributions from this development center including SQL Server Compact 3.5.1.  I am very proud of the work that they have done on this release.

Namaste!