Monday, August 11, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Released Today

 

The teams at Microsoft officially released the Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008, TFS, and the .NET Framework 3.5.  You can download the bits from MSDN or TechNet.Learn More About Visual Studio 2008

Although the official RTM announcement was made today, some of the release bits actually shipped with the SQL Server 2008 RTM which was released 5 days earlier.  If you downloaded SQL Server 2008 prior to today, and already had Visual Studio 2008 installed, you may have encountered some issues during the setup.  You might have also noticed that Visual Studio 2008 RTM had a few issues connecting to SQL Server 2008.  The SP1 should address these compatibility issues and bring both platforms up to speed.

So what's new in this SP1 for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio:

  • ASP.NET Dynamic Data - data scaffolding and quick automated, template-driven CRUD web sites
  • ADO.NET Data Services - query you sql server data store using REST-based URIs.
  • ASP.NET Routing Engine - map incoming URLs to route handlers for "beautiful" URLs on your web applications (oh and REST, too)
  • Improved AJAX script support for browser history (back/fwd buttons), and script combining for fewer (and cacheable) script resource requests to the web server
  • Vast performance improvements to the Visual Studio 2008 designer and better Intellisense support for javascript, classic ASP, etc, WCF refactorings, etc.
  • New WindowsForms controls, and significant WPF performance improvements (hardware acceleration)
  • WCF scalability improvements and support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
  • Team Foundation Server improvements

plus...improvements to VB and C# and much more!!!

This SP1 provides a ton of new features, fixes, improvements and enhancements, and makes it well worth the download.

For more details and a more exhaustive list of what's new, check out Scott Guthrie's blog post on the  pre-release version.  Also, check out Brian Harry's post on today's release with more details on the TFS bits.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Thiago, just listened to you on .Net Rocks. Good info but I didn't hear you mention an issue I've been waiting for a while now. I need to know if there is any plans to allow local mode reporting to run in Medium trust for web apps. I really want to use reporting services on small scale web apps with customers that use shared hosting but this cannot be done right now. Thanks

Unknown said...

Eric,



There might be plans to address that issue when the next version of the ReportViewer control ships (which will include support for the 2008 RDL schema). The culprit is that the RV control in local mode precompiles any expressions with the VB compiler and then has to create an "intermediate" format which is the same format that the ReportServer stores in the Report Catalog database for snapshots and cached executions. Once the intermediate file is created it is written to disk during processing, and this requires a Demand PermissionSet. You should not have this problem in server mode, as all processing is done on the ReportServer.

I know this doesn't address your needs for small scale web apps, but it answers your question. The only solution at this time is upgrade the hosting plan used, so that you can run in a server with Full Trust, or use a dedicated hosting plan.

--
Thiago

Anonymous said...

ETA on Reportviewer.exe and local mode for 2008 rdl schema?

Unknown said...

GarffCIO,

sorry for the delayed response.

doesn't look like it'll make it in the SP1 for SQL 2008. My best guess is we'll have to wait until Visual Studio 2010 - the dev team seems to be focused on other things at the moment.

best regards,