Today marks the release of some exciting new updates for .NET developers:
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1
- .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta 1
- Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition SP1 Beta 1
- Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1 Beta 1
Before going into what these releases encompass, let’s take a step back and make sure any feature ambiguity is cleared up. Back in December, a release was made under the name “ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview”. This release included the following features:
- ADO.NET Data Services
- ADO.NET Entity Framework
- ASP.NET AJAX History
- ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data
- ASP.NET MVC
- ASP.NET Silverlight controls
Since then, ASP.NET MVC was pulled out-of-band and is being released on Codeplex at regular iterations. The ASP.NET Silverlight controls were removed and added to the Silverlight 2 SDK. The ASP.NET Routing engine was decoupled from ASP.NET MVC and made into a stand-alone feature. So where does that leave us today? .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta 1 includes the following new features:
- ADO.NET Data Services
- ADO.NET Entity Framework
- ASP.NET AJAX History
- ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data
- ASP.NET Routing
As you can see, .NET 3.5 SP1 makes up the majority of what used to be called the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, with the exception of the few features mentioned above, which aren’t part of this release.
In addition to those awesome new features, .NET 3.5 SP1 also includes of slew on enhancements as well, including:
- WPF performance increases (application coldstarts, list controls)
- New WinForms controls
What enhancements has Visual Studio 2008 received in SP1?
- Integrated Entity Data Model designer
- SQL Server 2008 Support
- Improved JavaScript Formatting/Intellisense/Debugging
- ASP Intellisense/Debugging
- .NET Framework Client Profile
Prior to Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you had to download the Entity Framework Tools release to get the Entity Data Model designer, but it is now baked into the IDE. Also, support for connecting to SQL Server 2008 databases is included in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
As for this “.NET Framework Client Profile” thing, what is that? Well, as much as I’d love to go into it, I’ll defer the explanation of this cool new feature to The Gu.
As a side note, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1 isn’t compatible with Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio Beta 1. If you have the Silverlight Tools Beta 1 installed, you’ll have to uninstall it in order to install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1. Since the ASP.NET Silverlight controls aren’t a part of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but rather the Silverlight 2 SDK, you’ll have to wait until the Beta 2 release of the Silverlight 2 SDK in order to use them in conjunction with Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
Hopefully this makes it clear what exactly SP1 contains, so you can determine whether you want to download this beta release. If you have any questions or feedback about SP1 Beta 1 please feel free to email me.
I will be diving into a lot of the individual features/enhancements mentioned above in coming weeks, so stay tuned.
