.NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 have been released

On Monday this week, the .NET Framework v3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 were publicly released. 

The .NET Framework v3.5 includes some nice new capabilities in the communications stack, specifically REST support, support for JSON or XML serialization, and ATOM & RSS Syndication support.  There's also some nice integration between WCF and ASPNET AJAX - where an AJAX page can act as a client to a WCF service that uses REST + JSON. 

Concurrent with the .NET Framework v3.5, we've also released Service Pack 1 (sp1) for the .NET Framework 2.0, and sp1 for the .NET Framework 3.0.  The Service Packs are strict subsets of the v3.5 capability. 

Special note: these SP1's cannot be installed on Windows Vista !  The 2.0 sp1 and 3.0 sp1 packages noted below are for pre-Vista operating systems.  If you want .NET 2.0 sp1 or .NET 3.0 sp1 for Vista, then you have to wait for the forthcoming Vista SP1. Make sense?

Download links for the .NET Framework stuff:

The SP1's will be available on Windows Update shortly, again for pre-Vista OS's. Automatic Update will follow sometime later.

Cheers!