The Microsoft Visual Studio .Net development team have released Visual Studio 2008 to manufacturing. That means it will be in our hands Real Soon Now. For those of us who have been eagerly awaiting the advances made in this new version of Visual Studio .Net, this is exciting news.

First of all, there are significant language updates. Both C# and VB.NET have new language features that will increase developer performance, allow more opportunities for abstraction and code re-use and help us to write more readable code.

Linq is one of the big new features. It integrates a query language into C# and Visual Basic, allowing for writing of declarative, SQL-like queries directly into programs. These can be type-checked at compile time, unlike strings of SQL. Furthermore, this is not just for databases: you can run queries over collections of objects, XML documents and more. For databases there's another win - because you are writing in C# or VB syntax, you don't need to worry about the syntax of SQL, or which database server you are using.

There was no matching Visual Studio release for the .Net 3.0 framework, so if you have not started using it then this release will bring you the new features of that too. This includes WPF - the Windows Presentation Foundation - which will help with building powerful and beautiful user interfaces with less work than it would have required before, and WCF - the Windows Communication Foundation - which helps to abstract away the details of the transport mechanism and make building service oriented architecture easier. Note that the framework version is now as 3.5 - a little confusing, given C# is version 3.0. Just use and enjoy.

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