Nate's Stuff

As promised by Microsoft when Visual Studio 2008 launched late last year, there is a service pack for available both for the .Net framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.  Information about the release can be found on ScottGu's Blog and mostly include bug fixes and performance enhancements, but the points of interest for me are:

• ASP.NET Routing Engine which gives you the ability to map URL's to route handlers. For example the URL http://www.mysite.com/myapp/data/234/editComment
• ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support gives you the ability to control the forward & back button clicks on the browser.  This will be very useful for "single page" ASP.NET AJAX implementations.
• Performance improvements on the web editor in VS 2008.
• JavaScript Formatting Settings
• CLR performance improvements including startup times that are 40% faster and faster ASP.NET requests (up to 10% faster).
• WPF New Features and Performance Enhancements!
  • Performance enhancements using GPU
  • New "WritableBitmap" which allows for tear-free bitmap updates.
  • ListBox, ListView, and TreeView now support "item container recycling" and virtualization which results in better performance.  This will have a huge effect on large amounts of data.
  • Deferred Scrolling which doesn't render until the mouse up on a scroll event.  This will can have a enormous effect on huge data sets.
  • StringFormat support within binding expressions
  • New Alternating Rows support for controls derived from ItemControl
  • Events tab support within the property browser in VS 2008
  • Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML
• SQL Server 2008 Support
• The long awaited ADO.NET Entity Framework which includes integration with any database
• Improvements in WCF including scailability, ADO.NET Entities in service contracts, and Improved Debugging support for WCF.
• Improvements to C#; The C# code editor now identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify. The debugger in VS 2008 SP1 has also been improved to provide more debugging support for evaluating LINQ expressions and viewing results at debug time
• Fixes to TFS

Installation Cautions

• If you are running this on Vista, be sure Vista SP1 is installed!
• If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta
• If you are running anything earlier than Expression Blend 2.5, then you need to update it to the latest.  Earlier versions will cease to run.
• This is still beta software -- Install at your own risk!

A direct download link can also be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx

--Nathan Zaugg