Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

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Visual Studio and .NET Developers, along with their customers, got a nice treat today with the release of VS 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1! You can get the laundry list of features and download it here but there's some work that I'm particularly excited about.

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes some excellent improvements in cold startup for WPF applications. These aren't just 3-5% improvements; these are 20, 30 and even 40%+ improvements! The best part is that applications don't need to do anything to get the benefit in most cases! Imagine, one day your application just got significantly faster to start!

The second improvement I'm very excited about is the .NET 3.5 SP1 Client Profile. Basically, this is a subset of .NET 3.5 SP1 targeted at those building client applications. It weighs in at around 26.5 MB, a nearly 86% reduction from the 197 MB of the entire Framework. Additionally, it allows for a customized install experience of the Framework! The sum is dramatically improved install experiences for Windows applications built using .NET!