Visual Studio 2008 Ships

Microsoft has released its Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework
3.5 to manufacturing. The technology is available to MSDN subscribers.
Company officials said Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas, contains
more than 250 new features and delivers significant enhancements in
every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team
System to enable developers of all levels -- from hobbyists to enterprise
development teams to build applications. Among the improvements in the
Orcas release is that Microsoft has made web development easier with
new support for Web server communication techniques for Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML and JavaScript Object Notation (AJAX/JSON) enabled
Web sites. Also, new ASP.NET controls allow for better page management
and templates, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) delivers
native support for RSS and REST (Representational State Transfer).
The .NET Framework 3.5 also delivers several new features, including
capabilities for Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and
Software plus Services-based applications. Workflow enabled services
provide a new programming model classes that simplifies building
workflow-enabled services by using Windows Communication Foundation
and Windows Workflow Foundation. This allows .Net Framework developers
to build business logic for a service using Windows Workflow Foundation
and expose messaging from that service using WCF. Microsoft also has
placed additional Web services protocol support in WCF, including Web
Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) 1.1,
WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1, WS-SecureConversation, and Web Services
Coordination (WS-Coordination) 1.1.