Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 BETA
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Earlier this month, Microsoft made a beta version of the upcoming Service Pack 1 available to the public. There is not an exact date for the actual release of SP1, but the word is "middle of the year" which is not too far away now. Seems kind of funny to have a beta of a service pack, but this service pack is a lot more than a host of bug fixes - in itself a point of debate. Why? Because to many people, a service pack should be for bug fixes, not to introduce new technologies, yet this SP1 has a lot of new technologies and a lot of improvements to Visual Studio. But the options are to be a purist and keep the service pack for fixes then release a whole bunch of stuff out of band where people have to go hunt down the pieces and install them separately, or take advantage of the Service Pack and give us everything in one shot. I prefer the latter - though of course, it could introduce new bugs with the new tools, but that's another story. Microsoft's Heath Stewart describes the Service Pack on his blog Changes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes over 250 new features and improvements to existing features, including SQL Server 2008 support. .NET 3.5 SP1 also includes many new features on which VS 2008 SP1 is dependent. Because of this, VS 2008 SP1 chains .NET 3.5 SP1 and other necessary components.... This means the complete download for VS 2008 SP1 is large - almost twice as large as VS 2005 SP1. The full beta download is about 761 MB which contains the 229 MB full redistributable for .NET 3.5 SP1. However, because of changes we made for VS 2008 SP1 the patch installs in about half of the average time it took for VS 2005 SP1. In addition, we made some additional changes we're sure you'll like. [For a detailed list of what's in the Service Pack, see Scott Guthrie's blog post: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta While I was expecting some of these things, I was definitely surprised by many of the items listed in his blog post.] Microsoft has been working on a bunch of new technologies that are wrapped into this service pack (remember this is just the beta so far). All of the tools that have been part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions (e.g. Dynamic Data controls, AJAX Back & Forward Button History (see links at the bottom of this post to some great info on this by Jonathan Carter), ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria), Entity Framework (yes, finally!) are part of the service pack. There are a lot of improvements across the board - for web, wpf, winforms and services development. The most important information in Scott's list, however is the installation notes. Many people have been having difficulty with the install. I got it on one computer in a breeze and after 14 hours of trying gave up on getting it onto my laptop and gave in to using a VPC. VPC's are not a bad idea when you are working with betas. I have gotten used to living on the edge a little (and sometimes paying the price, too). Here are some posts that you may want to keep in mind to avoid or solve problems installing the service pack: More from Heath Stewart: KB944899 Should be Removed before Installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 How to Download all of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (This is if you want to have the installation in a local package rather than installing directly from the web.) Visual Studio and .NET Log Collection Utility The Release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will Install over SP1 Beta Jonathan Carter's 3 part blog post on ASP.NET AJAX Button History ASP.NET AJAX History Part 1: Server-Side |
