Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft has released betas of the first service packs for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5:

Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).

We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here.

At the first link there’s quite a list of enhancements including SQL Server 2008 support, ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria"), and the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 extensions previewed in December.

European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, fresh off her antitrust victory over Microsoft in the European Court of First Instance, has launched two new investigations into anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft:

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As promised last week, Microsoft yesterday released preview versions of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions:

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Microsoft Developer Division General Manager Scott Guthrie today revealed the roadmap for a series of additional Web development products that build on top of last week’s RTM of Visual Studio and .NET FX 3.5. In outline form with liberal quoting from Guthrie, it looks like the following:

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As promised earlier in the month, Microsoft yesterday released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 to manufacturing. This marks the readiness of the first of the three amigos for the lollapalooza Global Launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Feb. 27, 2008.

Availability is as follows:

• Visual Studio 2008 is now available for download by MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscribers with disk packages available soon.
• If you aren’t a MSDN subscriber and can’t wait, you can download Visual Studio trial editions.
• .NET FX 3.5 is available for free download as are the Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions.