Visual Studio, .NET Framework Update Coming

Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will get significant updates in a service pack planned for late summer 2008. Currently available in beta form, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 updates the developer tools and the underlying .NET Framework 3.5 with new technologies for Web and database development and makes it more practical to distributed thick-client PC applications. The improved Web and data technologies could reduce coding and make applications more testable and maintainable, although the technologies overlap and could get a future shakeout. Also, the SP1 beta is incompatible with previews of other important developer technologies, complicating its testing.

The most important Web and data development technologies in SP1 have already appeared in a Dec. 2007 technology preview called (somewhat inaccurately) the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions. However, that preview had a few features that are not in this beta release of SP1, and the beta SP1 includes other technologies that weren’t in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview.