I just saw this as Scott's blog while preparing something on SQL 2008 CTP. This is an amazing set of tools now released!!

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released

Today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  You can download the final release using one of the links below:

• If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note: some of the builds are just finishing being uploaded now - so check back later during the day if you don't see it yet).

• If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here.  A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week.  A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here.

• If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here. 

• If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

Quick Tour of Some of the New Features

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

Language Improvements and LINQ <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

Browsing the .NET Framework Library Source using Visual Studio <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

Lots of other improvements <snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming.  For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support.  ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox.  WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data. 

Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon, and with Outlook.  Visual Studio Tools for Office support is also now built-into Visual Studio (you no longer need to buy a separate product).

New WCF and Workflow projects and designers are now included in VS 2008.  Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS).  Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS.  AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU.  And there is much, much more...

Installation Suggestions

People often ask me for suggestions on how best to upgrade from previous betas of Visual Studio 2008.  ..........<snipped - see the original blog entry for more>

Silverlight Tools and VS Web Deployment Project Add-Ins

Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release.  These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio.  Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks.  If you are doing Silverlight 1.1 development using VS 2008 Beta2 you'll want to stick with with VS 2008 Beta2 until this updated Silverlight Tools Add-In is available. 

Hope this helps,

Scott

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released - ScottGu's Blog

ttfn

David