Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 shipped!

I am thrilled to announce that earlier today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

 

Over the past few months, I have blogged about some incredible features that the team working on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 have built. I wanted to share these with you so that you can get a flavor of a few of the several hundred features that are a part of this release. The entire family of Visual Studio products (from the Express Editions to the Professional version to Visual Studio Team Suite) and .NET Framework 3.5 are available for immediate download here.

 

I am incredibly proud to be a part of the team that is truly advancing the state of developer tools. We know we could not have done this alone and I wish to thank you all (the community, customers and early adopters) who have provided incredibly valuable feedback to make these products the right ones.

 

When I look back over the last few years at how we were able to ship these two products, I truly believe that both our customer input and our renewed focus on intentional engineering allowed us to release a great product in the timeline that we originally set out to hit. We adopted Team Foundation Server to manage this release and to collect data and enable reporting on our progress. It was incredibly helpful to me personally to be able to view our progress in real time. Just adopting TFS, however, was not the silver bullet – it was just a vehicle to enable the behaviors we desired. TFS enables process enactment, collects a lot of data, and enables reporting on it. It provides visibility to everyone and it enables enforcement of certain things. I had a chance to film a Channel9 video talking about this that you can check out.

 

We hope that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 enables you as an individual or as a team to build great applications. Whether you are a professional developer or a software enthusiast, are building applications for the client, server, web, or devices we hope you have fun with these products as your software is our passion.

 

Namaste!