Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 RTM!

Today we released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5!  I want to congratulate the division on this major accomplishment. 

I've been building applications all along with VS 2008 and there are some very cool features.  Some of my favorites include LINQ, XML Literals in VB.Net, and the advances in JavaScript development from intellisense to advanced debugging.  There a hundreds of cool things to find in the product.

In addition to the product features, we introduced several changes to the way we built the product itself.  We had tighter integration between PM/Dev/Test the entire way through (the Feature Crew model) which allowed us to get integrated builds much sooner and dogfood quicker.  We worked out our x-team dependencies far sooner than ever before leading to a more predictable schedule.  As Soma says in his blog, we drove this through the usage of TFS.  But the lion share of the credit goes to the engineering teams for pushing hard on quality and community feedback early in the cycle.  I've been working on .NET/VS since it started and this was the smoothest release we've had.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think.  You can find everything you need to get started here.  Enjoy!