Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 Beta Download

Soma announced this morning that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 is now ready and can be downloaded. This includes several updates, includes support for SQL Server 2008, and has a few new products including the Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities and ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria). ScottGu posted some notes regarding what's included in the service pack, as well.

Of course all of this is released 2 days before I have a demonstration on the Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities on Wednesday to the Sarasota .NET and SQL Server User groups. So I have a few modifications to make for my presentations.

I received an error when I first tried to install it. The problem was that the service pack was in conflict with Silverlight Tools Beta for Visual Studio 2008 which I was using to create/edit Silverlight 2 applications. Once uninstalling this i was able to get the service pack to install properly. Scott Gu's post discusses this issue as well as the importance of making sure you install Vista SP 1 first.

Check out ScottGu's post for full details.