There is no doubt that VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 totally rocks! ScottGu's division keeps pushing these products and constantly improving developer's productivity and shortening development cycle.
This time MS is preparing to release .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.
In short here are improvements:
Improvements for Client Development
- ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
- SP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
- ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support
- ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support - Omar Al Zabir wrote an extensive article about this approach.
- Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor
- Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
- Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks - who can blame MS that force us to use their JS framework now?!
- Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects
- Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging - I am wondering when this technology will be declared dead :) (This is what I used in my first web apps too :))
Improvements for Client Development
- Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements
- New .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package
- New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications
- ClickOnce Client Application Deployment Improvements
- Windows Forms Controls
- WPF Performance Improvements
- WPF Data Improvements
- WPF Extensible Shader Effects
- WPF Interoperability with Direct3D
VS 2008 for WPF Improvements
- Several performance improvements
- Events tab support within the property browser
- Ability to sort properties alphabetically in the property browser
- Margin snaplines which makes form layout much quicker
- Better designer support for TabControl, Expander, and Grid
- Code initiated refactoring now updates your XAML (including both control declarations and event declarations in XAML)
- Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML
Data Development Improvements
- SQL 2008 Support
- ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities
- ADO.NET Data Services
WCF Development Improvements
- Significant scalability improvements (5-10x) in Web-hosted application scenarios
- Support for using ADO.NET Entity Framework entities in WCF contracts
- API usability improvements with DataContract Serializers, and with the UriTemplate and WCF web programming models
- Enhanced TestClient support within VS 2008 SP1
- New Hosting Wizard in VS 2008 SP1 for WCF Service Projects
- Improved debugging support in partial trust scenarios
VB and C# Improvements !!!
Team Foundation Server Improvements
Pretty impressive...
Read full novel by Scott Guthrie here :)