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.