The long awaited Visual Studio 2008 was finally released to manufacturing yesterday 19th November.

Highlights of the environmnet built upon .NET 3.5, also relased yesterday include.

• Multi-targeting of .NET2.0, .NET3.0 and .NET3.5 all from the same IDE
• Built in AJAX support - no seperate download
• Extensive changes to the web design component which is based on the expression web designer engine.
• Extensive support for CSS developement
• Language improvements
• LINQ - Language Integrated Query - Built-in Object Relation Mapper (OR/M)  - Working with data now as easy as working with a class
• Data access improvements

This really is an exciting update to the already formidable developer toolset.

Scott Gutherie has published the first of his hotly anticipated series on the new MVC architecture for ASP.NET

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx