So I have been fielding a lot of questions about this over the last few weeks and I can happily announce that Visual Studio 2008 (.Net 3.5) has been released and is available to MSDN subscribers at http://msdn.microsoft.com.

 

Visual Studio 2008 has the following improvements (to name just a few):

  • Side-by-Side support (works side-by side with VS2005)
  • Multi-targeting (VS2008 can target .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5)
  • Unit Testing is now available in all editions of VS Professional
  • "Cider" designer integrated into VS 2008 (Full XAML support, rich CSS support, and more)
  • Source code editor

.Net 3.5 has improvements in:

  • LINQ
  • Workflow enabled services (WCF Activities in WF)
  • .NET Compact Framework (WCF in CF to name one)
  • WCF
  • WPF

VSTO improvements and more...

I suggest anyone who is currently developing in .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0 take a good hard look at this release.  You will still be able target your current environments while opening the door to the new features like LINQ, Workflow enabled services, etc.

As always you can get all the info you need about VS2008 and .Net 3.5 on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com