• Enhanced Collaborations – between designers and developers make it much easier to create more compelling user experiences. Designers can use Microsoft Expression Web to design a User Interface (UI) and then turn it over to the developers with faith that the subsequent developed business logic code will result with UI design remaining intact.

• Improved Mobile Development – within both the Professional and Team systems makes it even easier to extend desktop applications to mobile base devices. Along with .NET Framework 3.5, there are enhanced mobile Windows Forms controls that make it easy to modify and optimize mobile applications' screens to support the mobile devices' smaller displays.

• Silverlight Support – is included via a Silverlight SDK and Silverlight Tools for VS08. This is a rich internet application technology that includes a subset of WPF.

Other enhancements

• JavaScript Intelesense
• Nested ASP.NET master page support at design time
• Rich CSS editing and layout support within the WYSIWYG designer
• Split View Designer for having both source and designer visible at the same time

OK, as with any release of a new version of Visual Studio, there are two questions that need to be answered. First, is this early release ready for prime time, and second is it really worth the upgrade? I have been running Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition for a few weeks now and I have not experienced any problems that could not be traced back to my own fault. In doing some web research, I did find a hot fix that is posted on the MSDN blog that is a performance fix with regards to some sluggishness when working in Design View, but everything on this release appears to be pretty clean.

The next question on is this version worth the upgrade? My personal opinion is that it is most definitely worth the upgrade. I guess that if you are writing console apps in unmanaged C++ you can probably skip the upgrade, but if you are doing anything modern especially with regards to application or web development, you will be letting your competition get the upper hand if you don't upgrade.

The WPF, WCF, and LINQ are alone worth the upgrade and when you add VSTO, JavaScript Intelesense, Multi-Framework, and ASP.NET AJAX, to me it becomes a no-brainer.