Yesterday, marked the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional and Team System to MSDN subscriptions. This edition makes some significant improvements to developing applications for the web. They have integrated the editor that is used within the expressions web tool to allow split window development of code viewing and WYSIWYG editing at the same time.
With the release of Visual Studio 2008, they also released .NET Framework 3.5 as well. Version 3.5 includes the much talked about LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and data awareness. This allows you to write queries in LINQ enabled languages to fully manipulate SQL Data, collections, XML and DataSets.
The following Express editions are now available for download:
The express editions allow for hobbyists or students to get interested in creating applications and has a great way to see some of the improvements in the products.
Scott Guthrie provided a great listing of the features and capabilities of Visual Studio 2008 yesterday in his blog.
All in all this was an important release for anyone that is heavily involved in web application development with some of the advances that have been added to this edition it will make a much needed upgrade from previous versions.