Just installed the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. On a first look it runs quite well but seems to be more a big ServicePack to the VS 2005 with several extensions to include the .Net 3.5 Feature. This isn't that bad as VS2005 already was a nice IDE. There are just minor changes in the User-Interface of Visual Studio itself.

As a part of this new Visual Studio also the DLinq and its Designer is included. It looks and works a lot like the class-diagram. In beta-versions of the DLinq-Designer it was a totally different thing than the Class-Diagrams.

Upgrading ASP.net Apps should be easy as one can add binding-mappings in the Web.config but for some reason this did not totally work within an app that uses 3rd party controls. Have to investigate this further on.

I also had a quick look on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It looks quite interesting from a theoretic view but I am not sure if it is kind of productive than development using WinForms was. Time will show this and I have to get some more practice on WPF. I also got a look on a "Expression Blends" Tutorial which looked quite well. It seems that this IDE for WPF-UIs is more powerfull than the integrated designer in VS2008. Lets check it out when it gets released.

More on the new stuff will follow later on.