The ideas and sometimes the actors ricochet around the stage with such energy and scattershot purpose in Adam Rapp’s “Bingo With the Indians” that they might be in a pinball machine.

Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today.  You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here. Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine.  It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines.  These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out.  But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads.  You can download both of them here.  The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release.  UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup.  Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size).  Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download.  This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications.  This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls.  This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility.  I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here. This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it.  To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application.  To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item.  We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template within.  We can name it and then choose to store the style at either the application level (within App.xaml) or within our current page/user-control: When we click "ok" we'll find ourselves in template editing mode for our Slider control.  We can change, tweak, or add/remove any of the underlying elements within the Slider control's template.  Notice below how in template editing mode we can see and select any of the underlying elements that make up the slider's control template (these are circled in red below in the "Objects" window).  To make our slider head narrower, we can select the "HorizontalThumb" element within the control template and adjust its width (either graphically or via the property grid):  We can then use the breadcrumb navigation bar at the top of the designer to navigate back to our page and see the control template changes applied: Notice that right now only one of our slider controls is using the new Style resource with the control template we defined.  To apply the same style resource to the other slider control as well, we can select it, right-click, and then use the "Apply Resource" context menu to apply our "ScottSlider" style to it as well: Once we do this both our sliders reference the same style: Changes we make to the "ScottSlider" style going forward will automatically apply to both controls. Note that all controls shipped with Silverlight 2 support control templates and will support the above editing experience in Expression Blend. Visual State Manager (VSM) Support Control templates in Silverlight and WPF support customizing both the "look" of a control, as well as the "feel" of a control.  By "feel" I mean changing its interactive responsiveness.  For example: how it reacts when pushed, when it gets focus, loses focus, is in a pushed state, is in a disabled state, has something inside it selected, etc.  Often you want animations to execute when the user interacts with a control like this. One of the new things we are introducing with Silverlight 2 Beta2 is a "Visual State Manager" (VSM) feature that makes it much easier to build interactive control templates.  VSM introduces two basic concepts that you can take advantage of within control templates: "Visual States" and "State Transitions".  For example, a control like Button defines multiple visual states for itself - "Normal", "MouseOver", "Pressed", "Disabled", "Focused", "Unfocused".   When in template editing mode in Blend, designers now have the ability to easily edit what the button looks like in each particular state, as well as setup transition rules to control how long it should take to animate when moving from one state to another.  At runtime Silverlight will then dynamically run the appropriate animation Storyboards to smoothly move the control from one state to another. What is nice about this model is that designers do not need to write code, do not need to manually create animation storyboards, and do not need to understand the object model of controls in order to be productive.  This makes the learning curve for creating interactive control templates really easy, and means that existing graphic designers can very easily work on Silverlight projects.  Later this year we will also be adding Visual State Manager (VSM) support to WPF as well, which will let you use the same approach with Windows applications as well as share control templates between WPF and Silverlight projects. To see an example of this in action, let's add a Button control onto our design surface: We can then right click on the button and edit its control template. Instead of starting with the existing default control template (like we did with the slider example above), let's create an empty control template and start from scratch: Blend will prompt us for the name of the Style resource we want to create.  We'll name it "ScottButton" and click ok.  This will then put the designer in control editing mode for the Button, and start with an empty control template: One of the things to notice above is the new "States" window inside Blend.  This will show us all of the available "Visual States" that the Button control exposes.  Above the "Base" state is currently selected - which allows us to define the common visual tree of our Button control template.  We can then add some vector elements into our base state that defines the look of a custom button like below.  We could use the built-in vector drawing tool support provided by Blend to author these graphics, or alternatively use Expression Design or Adobe Illustrator to build the vector art and then import it into Blend.  Below we are adding 4 "Path" elements into our control template - one a rounded background (named "background"), one a drop shadow (named "shadow"), one a 40% opacity "shine" that adds a glow near the top, and one that defines the default inner content (in this case a picture of a house): Note: we could have alternatively imported an image, but using vector elements will give us the flexibility to scale/stretch/transform the button later and retain a crisp look and feel at any resolution or scale (particularly useful with Silverlight mobile scenarios - where screen resolutions might be different or smaller).  It will also allow us to easily animate/change any vector element within the artwork. Once we've finished designing our base state above, we can press F5 to run our application in the browser: As you can see above - our Button control now has a nicer look.  Despite its new look, the button still raises the same focus, click and hover events just like before - so a developer using the button does not need to change any code when working with a button that uses our new control template. One downside with our new button control template, though, is that it isn't interactive.  This means that I don't get any visual feedback if the button gains/looses focus, or if a mouse hovers over it.  I also don't get a nice depress/bounce-back animation when I click it. To add interactivity to our button, we'll return back to Blend and work with our Button's control template again.  Previously we added vector graphic elements to the "Base" state of our Button control.  This allowed us to define the default visual look of all visual states of our Button.  We can now go back and customize individual Button visual states further. For example, to implement a mouse-over behavior for our Button, we can select the "MouseOver" state in the "States" window, and then tweak the look of the button when it is in that state.  Below I've selected the "shine" vector element inside our control template and adjusted its Opacity property in the property grid to have it be more visible when in the MouseOver state.  Notice how Blend automatically highlighted the "Shine" element with a red dot and then listed the Opacity property below it in our objects window.  This makes it easy to quickly track all changes that we've made between the "Base" state and the "MouseOver" state in our control template: We can then select the "Pressed" state in the "States" window, and customize what a button looks like when it is pressed.  We'll change two things from the "base" state.  The first change is to make the "shine" element visible (like the MouseOver state). The second change will be to slightly offset the contents of the button control - while keeping the shadow element stationary.  This will give the button a nice "depressed" look and contrast nicely with its base visual: We can implement the offset change to the background, content and shine elements by selecting them in the designer, and then apply an offset render transform to them in the property browser: And now when we run our application again in the browser, we'll find that our Button now has interactive visual feedback when it is being used.  Below is the "normal" look of our Button: Hovering the mouse over the Button will then cause it to glow like below: Clicking the button will then cause it to depress and hide the shadow (it will then bounce back once the mouse button is released): Note that we did not have to write any code or XAML to change our Button's look and feel - the new Visual State Manager feature automatically handled moving between visual states for us.  By default Silverlight dynamically constructs and runs a transition Storyboard for you as you move from visual state to visual state (providing a smooth animation between the two states).  You do not need to write any code in order to make this happen (note: you do still have the ability to drop down and add a custom Storyboard transition if you want to, but for most cases you can probably use the automatic Storyboard transition). One feature you can take advantage of with Silverlight's automatic transition feature is to customize the time duration it takes for a visual state transition to occur.  You can do this by clicking the arrow to the right of a visual state and setup a rule that controls how long it should take the transition animation to run when moving from one particular state to another. For example, we could indicate that we want it to take .2 seconds to transition from the "Normal" to "MouseOver" visual state by adding the rule below: We can then configure this rule to take .2 seconds to transition between Normal->MouseOver like so: We can then click on the "MouseOver" state and setup a rule that causes the transition from MouseOver->Normal to take .4 seconds: Now when we re-run our application we'll have slower animation transitions for MouseOver scenarios, which adds a slightly smoother and more polished feel to our application.  We did not have to write a single line of code to enable this.  All controls shipped with Silverlight 2 will have built-in support for Control Template and Visual State Manager customization like above. To learn more about the new Visual State Manager and Control Template Editing features, please check out the tutorials here and here, and the videos on it here, here, and here. TextBox Beta2 includes some significant improvements to the built-in TextBox editing control.  Text scrolling with text-wrap, multi-line text selection, document navigation keys, and copy/paste from the clipboard are now supported. Beta2 also now includes IME Level 3 input support (including candidate window selection) for non-western character sets: Input Support Beta2 adds additional keyboard support in FullScreen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space).  Note: full key input support isn't allowed to avoid password spoofing scenarios. Beta2 also adds new APIs to support inking and stylus input support. UI Automation and Accessibility Beta2 adds UI Automation Framework support into Silverlight.  UI Automation (or UIA) enables screen readers and other assistive tools to identify and interact with the components that make up your Silverlight 2 application. Beta2 uses the UIA framework and adds UIA based behaviors to an initial set of Silverlight controls.  By the final release of Silverlight 2 all controls will have UIA based behaviors built-in.  We will also add support for high-contrast scenarios.  These features will enable you to build accessible, section 508 compliant, applications.  This UIA support will also enable automated UI testing of applications. Animation and Graphic System Beta2 adds support for animating custom dependency properties.  Object animation support (animating structs) is also now supported.  Beta2 also supports the ability to create Storyboards in code that can animate parts of the render tree without having to be added to it (allowing you to embed animations entirely in code).  Per frame animation callback support will be added in the final release. Beta2 includes a new Visual Tree Helper static class that provides advanced visual tree inspection APIs.  It provides features such as the ability to enumerate children of an element and getting the ancestor/parent of a given reference element.  These APIs work against any UIElement you pass to it. DeepZoom Beta2 now supports an XML based manifest file for DeepZoom collections.  Beta2 also adds extensible MultiScaleTileSource support for DeepZoom (which allows developers to hook up existing image pyramids that don’t conform with the Deep Zoom format to the high performance rendering of Deep Zoom). WPF Compatibility Silverlight Beta2 includes a lot of fixes/changes to improve API compatibility between Silverlight and WPF (note: the final Silverlight release will contain some additional compatibility work as well).  We are also adding some new APIs we are introducing in Silverlight 2 to WPF in .NET 3.5 SP1 this summer. This work, combined with the VSM support we are adding to WPF later this year, will enable good code re-use across browser and desktop applications. Media Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes some significant Media related feature work: Adaptive Streaming Beta2 adds support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables you to encode media at multiple bit-rates and then have a Silverlight application dynamically switch between them depending on the network and CPU conditions. This enables much richer end-user media experiences - since it makes it possible for content providers to provide both lower-end and higher-end bit rate versions of a video, and then have Silverlight choose the optimal one to use based on an end-user's machine hardware and network capacity.  If while watching the video the machine or network conditions change, Silverlight can automatically switch to a more appropriate bit-rate without any buffering or interruption glitch. Silverlight's support for adaptive streaming is extensible - which enables anyone to plug-in their own logic to control where the media content comes from, and what bit-rate should be used.  This means that any CDN or media delivery provider can easily integrate their systems with Silverlight and deliver super high quality video delivery. Content Protection Beta2 includes DRM content protection, and supports Windows DRM and PlayReady DRM.  Both work cross browser and cross platform. Server Side Playlists Beta2 adds support for server side playlists (previous releases only supported client-side playlists).  Networking Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the networking space: Cross Domain Sockets Beta2 now enables cross domain networking support using both HTTP and Sockets (meaning your application can call sites other than the one the application was downloaded from). Silverlight will check for the existence of an XML policy file on target servers that indicates whether cross domain network access is allowed.  Silverlight supports a new XML policy file format that we've developed, as well as Flash policy files (which means existing sites open to Flash can be called from Silverlight without any additional work). Background Thread Networking Beta2 now allows Silverlight applications to initiate network requests on background threads, as well as process/handle network responses on background threads.  This enables a bunch of powerful scenarios, and allows you to avoid blocking the browser's UI thread while doing both HTTP and Socket network communication. Duplex Communication (Server Push) Beta2 enables support for setting up duplex communication channels with a WCF service on a server.  This enables a clean programming model that allows servers to "push" messages to Silverlight clients without the developer having to manually poll servers for changes.  This programming model is very useful in a variety of scenarios, including instant messenger/chat applications, and monitoring/update applications like stock tickers and trader applications. Web Services Beta2 enables significantly improved interop with SOAP based web-services.  Web service proxy class end-point URLs can now be configured without recompiling applications.  Visual Studio also now has a new "Silverlight-enabled WCF Service" project item template that you can add to ASP.NET web projects to publish services to clients. REST and ADO.NET Data Services Silverlight includes support for working with REST based web-services.  Beta2 adds support for calling and consuming ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named: "Astoria").  ADO.NET Data Services will ship as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 and makes it easy to publish data end-points within an ASP.NET web project that are consumable from any client using REST URIs.  Silverlight Beta2 now includes ADO.NET Data Service client support that allows you to easily call these services (and optionally use LINQ expressions within Silverlight to express remote REST queries to them). JSON Silverlight supports calling JSON-based services on the web.  Beta2 now includes LINQ to JSON support that enables you to easily query, filter, and map JSON results to .NET objects within a Silverlight application.  This makes it easy to call and work with existing AJAX end-points and services published on the web.  Data Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the data space: DataGrid Beta2 adds a number of new features to the DataGrid control. These include: Auto-sizing support for columns and rows Column sorting (with both single column and multi-column sort support)  Column re-ordering support by end-users (allowing them to drag/drop columns to re-arrange the order) Frozen column support (allowing you to prevent a particular column from being customized) Performance and bug fixes DataBinding Beta2 adds more core data-binding features and better validation support.  These include: Per-binding Validation and BindingValidationError event handler support on controls (allowing you to handle input validation with TwoWay bindings) Support for binding expressions on attached properties Richer binding value conversion support (including value conversion fallback support) Isolated Storage Silverlight enables applications to store data locally on a client (via a feature we call "Isolated Storage").  Applications can prompt users to grant them size permissions for this storage (for example: a user might grant an email program 50MB of local storage).  Beta2 increases the default local storage space provided to Silverlight applications to 1MB in size.  Beta2 also now provides better end-user support for managing per-site storage permissions, as well as the ability to easily revoke/delete an application's local storage.  Management UI to control this can now be brought up by an end-user by right-clicking on a Silverlight application and choosing the "Silverlight Configuration" menu option. Understanding Compatibility with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Silverlight 2 Beta2 is compatible with applications that target Silverlight 1.0. Silverlight 2 Beta2 will not run applications that target Silverlight 2 Beta1, since we've made a number of API changes between the two betas for the new features being added in Silverlight 2.  Browsers that have Silverlight 2 Beta1 installed which visit a site that hosts a Silverlight Beta2 application will be prompted to upgrade to the newer beta of Silverlight.  Once they do this they won't be able to run Beta1 applications without uninstalling Beta2.  This means that if you have published a running sample on the web built with Beta1 you will probably want to update it to Beta2 soon.  We have published a document that details the changes between Beta1 and Beta2 here that can help with this.  I also recommend reading Shawn Wildermuth's What Changed in Silverlight 2 Beta2 and Upgrading your Silverlight 2 Projects to Beta2 posts for more details on some of the changes between Beta1 and Beta2. Summary To learn more about Silverlight 2 and download the Beta2 release, please visit the http://www.silverlight.net and http://expression.microsoft.com web-sites.  We'll be posting articles, tutorials, videos and more on both sites in the days and weeks ahead.  I'll also be posting some tutorials of my own here on my blog as well.  If you haven't already read them I'd also recommend checking out my previous First Look at Silverlight 2 and First Look at Expression Blend with Silverlight 2 blog posts that I wrote a few months ago when Beta1 shipped, since they provide a good overview of the Silverlight programming model and how to target it using both Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. Hope this helps, Scott

Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here. Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines.  There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of: 1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta.  There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release.  These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta. 2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure).  You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things).  It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package.  We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta. 3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend.  This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running.  Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue. Important Update: If you previously installed a VS 2008 Hotfix, you must run the HotFix Cleanup Utility before installing the VS 2008 SP1 Beta.  Click here to download and run this. Improvements for Web Development .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development.  The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here.  Below are more details on some of the work in the web-space: ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data) .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support for a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD - create, read, update, delete - support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider). SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options.  It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names - all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code. You can learn more more about this feature from Scott Hanselman's videos and tutorials here. ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing) .NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers.  It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as support to dynamically calculate and generate new URLs from route registrations. This new routing engine is used by both ASP.NET Dynamic Data as well as the new ASP.NET MVC framework.  It will support both WebForms and MVC based requests.  ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support .NET 3.5 SP1 adds new APIs to ASP.NET AJAX to allow you to better control the history list of a browser (enabling you to control the behavior of the back/forward button of the browser). You can learn more about this feature in the article here and the screencast here. ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support .NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new <CompositeScript> element on the <asp:ScriptManager> server control, which allows you to declaratively define multiple script references within it.  All the script references within the CompositeScript element are combined together on the server and served as a single script to the client, reducing the number of requests to the server and improving page load time for ASP.NET AJAX applications. The script combining feature supports both path based scripts and assembly resource based scripts, and dynamically serves up the combined scripts using the ScriptResources.axd handler. Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor In February we released a HotFix roll-up that included a number of performance improvements and bug fixes for the VS 2008 Web Designer.  VS 2008 SP1 includes all of these fixes, as well as a number of additional performance improvements. Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences Visual Studio has for several releases supported rich source code formatting options for VB and C# (spacing, line breaks, brace positions, etc). VS 2008 SP1 adds richer source code formatting support for JavaScript as well (both inline <script> blocks and .js files).  You can now set your Javascript coding preferences using the Tools->Options dialog: These preferences will be automatically used as you type new Javascript code in the source editor.  You can also select existing code, right-click, and choose the "Format Selection" option to apply your style preferences to existing JavaScript code.  You can learn more about this new feature here. Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks VS 2008 includes Javascript Intellisense support in source view.  The intellisense support with the initial VS 2008 release works well with vanilla JavaScript as well as code written using the ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript type patterns.  JavaScript is a very flexible language, though, and many JavaScript libraries use this flexibility to full advantage to implement their features - sometimes in ways that prevented the intellisense engine from providing completion support. VS 2008 SP1 adds much better intellisense support for popular Javascript libraries (we specifically did work to support JQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, ExtJS, and other popular libraries).  You will get better default intellisense when you reference these libraries.  We are also looking at whether we can maintain additional intellisense hint files that you can download to get even better intellisense and documentation support for some of the more popular libraries. Below is an example of using a JQuery startup function with the VS 2008 SP1 JavaScript intellisense engine: Notice below how VS 2008 SP1 can now provide method argument completion even on chained JQuery selectors: Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects VS 2008 SP1 adds better refactoring support for WCF services included within both ASP.NET Web Site and ASP.NET Web Application Projects. If you use the refactoring support to rename the class name, interface contract, or namespace of a WCF service, VS 2008 SP1 will now automatically fix up the web.config and SVC file references to it. Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging Previous versions of Visual Studio included support for intellisense and debugging within classic ASP (.asp) pages.  The file and project templates to create classic ASP pages/projects hasn't been in VS for a few releases, though, and with the initial VS 2008 we incorrectly assumed this meant that people weren't still using the classic ASP support.  We heard feedback after we shipped that indeed they were.  With VS 2008 SP1 this support for classic ASP intellisense and debugging is back:   Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects The Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition (which is free) is being updated in SP1 to add support for both class library and ASP.NET Web Application project types.  Previous versions of Visual Web Developer Express only supported ASP.NET web-site projects. Among other benefits, the support of class library and web application projects will enable ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight projects to be built with the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.  All of the above JavaScript, Dynamic Data, Classic ASP, and AJAX improvements work with Visual Web Developer Express as well. Improvements for Client Development .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain major performance, deployment, and feature improvements for building client applications.  Tim Sneath has a great blog post that talks about some of the client improvements here.  Below are more details on them: Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes significant performance improvements to the CLR that enable much faster application startup times - in particular with "cold start" scenarios (where no .NET application is already running).  Much of these gains were achieved by changing the layout of blocks within CLR NGEN images, and by significantly optimizing disk IO access patterns.  We also made some nice optimizations to our JIT code generator that allow much better inlining of methods that utilize structs. We are today measuring up to 40% faster application startup improvements for large .NET client applications with SP1 installed.  These optimizations also have the nice side-effect of improving ASP.NET application request per second throughput by up to 10% in some cases. New .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package .NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new setup package option for developers building .NET client applications called the ".NET Framework Client Profile".  This provides a new setup installer that enables a smaller, faster, and simpler installation experience for .NET client applications on machines that do not already have the .NET Framework installed. The .NET Framework Client Profile setup contains just those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are typically used for client application scenarios.  For example: it includes Windows Forms, WPF, and WCF.  It does not include ASP.NET and those libraries and components used primarily for server scenarios.  We expect this setup package to be about 26MB in size, and it can be downloaded and installed much quicker than the full .NET Framework setup package. The assemblies and APIs in the .NET Framework Client setup package are 100% identical to those in the full .NET Framework setup package (they are literally the same binaries).  This means that applications can target both the client profile and full profile of .NET 3.5 SP1 (no recompilation required).  All .NET applications that work using the .NET Client Profile setup automatically work with the full .NET Framework. A developer can indicate that the client application they are building supports both the .NET Framework Client Profile and the full .NET Framework by pulling up the project properties page for a client application within VS 2008 SP1.  Within the project properties page they can select a new checkbox that indicates it only requires those assemblies included in the .NET Framework Client Profile: VS 2008 will then ensure that the project can only reference those assemblies shipped in the client profile setup package (and it will generate a compile error if you try and use a type in an assembly not included in the client redist).  The compiled client application will then run on machines that have both the full .NET Framework installed, as well as machines that only have the .NET Framework Client Profile installed. If you have a machine that only has the .NET Framework Client Profile installed, and you try and run a .NET application on it that did not mark itself as supporting the .NET Framework Client Profile, then the CLR will refuse to run the application - and will instead prompt the end-user to upgrade to the full .NET Framework package.  This ensures that applications always run correctly - and that developers do not need to worry about missing assembly exceptions at runtime if a user tries to run an application that requires the full .NET Framework on a machine that only has the .NET Framework Client Profile installed. We believe that a large class of .NET client applications will be able to use this new .NET Client Profile setup to significantly speed up their installation, and enable a much more consumer friendly experience. New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications .NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new "bootstrapper" component that you can use with client applications to help automate making sure that the right version of the .NET Framework is installed.  The bootstrapper component can handle automatically downloading and installing either the .NET Framework Client Profile or the full .NET Framework Setup Package from the Internet if your machine doesn't have either of them installed.  The boostrapper can also automatically handle upgrading machines that have a previous version of the .NET Framework installed.  For example, if your machine already has .NET 3.0 installed, and your application requires .NET 3.5, the bootstrapper can optionally download just the update files needed to upgrade it to .NET 3.5 (and avoid having to download the full .NET Framework setup download). The setup bootstrapper component can be used with both ClickOnce based setup packages, as well as with third party installer products (like Installshield).  The boostrapper optionally enables fully customized setup branding experiences (splash screens, custom setup wizard steps, etc) and should make it much easier to build optimized client setup experiences. ClickOnce Client Application Deployment Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several improvements for ClickOnce deployment of both Windows Forms and WPF applications.  Some of these improvements include: Support for the .NET Framework Client Profile (all ClickOnce features are supported with it) ClickOnce applications can now be programmatically installed through a ‘Setup.exe’ while displaying a customized, branded install UX ClickOnce improvements for generating MSI + ClickOnce application packages ClickOnce error dialog boxes now support links to application specific support sites on the Web ClickOnce now has design-time support for setting up file associations ClickOnce application publishers can now decide to opt out of signing and hashing the ClickOnce manifests as they see appropriate for their scenarios. Enterprises can now choose to run only Clickonce Applications Authenticode signed by ‘Known Publishers’ and block anything else from running FireFox browser extension to support Clickonce installations using FireFox browsers Windows Forms Controls SP1 adds several new Windows Forms controls - including new vector shape, Printing, and DataRepeater controls:   WPF Performance Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several significant performance optimizations and improvements to WPF.  Some of the specific graphics improvements include: Smoother animations Hardware accelerated rendering of Blur and DropShadow Bitmap Effects Text Rendering speed improvements - especially with VisualBrish and 3D scenes 2D graphics improvements - especially with z-index scenarios A new WriteableBitmap class that enables real-time and tear-free bitmap updates.  This enables custom "paint"-style applications, data visualizations, charts and graphs that optionally bypass the default WPF 2D graphics APIs. Layered window performance improvements SP1 also adds support for better data scalability in WPF.  The ListView, ListBox and TreeView controls now support "item container recycling" and "virtualization" support which allows you to easily achieve a 40% performance improvement with scrolling scenarios.  These controls also now optionally support a "deferred scrolling" feature which allows you to avoid scrolling in real time and instead wait until a user releases the scroll thumb (the default scrolling mode in Outlook). This can be useful when scrolling over very large data sets quickly.  WPF Data Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 includes several data binding and editing improvements to WPF.  These include: StringFormat support within {{ Binding }} expressions to enable easy formatting of bound values New alternating rows support within controls derived from ItemsControl, which makes it easier to set alternating properties on rows (for example: alternating background colors) Better handling and conversion support for null values in editable controls Item-level validation that applies validation rules to an entire bound item MultiSelector support to handle multi-selection and bulk editing scenarios IEditableCollectionView support to interface data controls to data sources and enable editing/adding/removing items in a transactional way Performance improvements when binding to IEnumerable data sources WPF also now exposes hooks that enable developers to write custom panels w/ virtualized scrolling.  We'll be using this support together with the above data binding improvements to build the new WPF datagrid that will be shipping later this year. WPF Extensible Shader Effects .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support in WPF for a new shader effects architecture and API that allows extremely expressive visual effects to be created and applied to any control or element within WPF.  These shader effects support blending multiple input compositions together.  What makes them particularly powerful is that WPF executes effects (including custom effects you build yourself) using the GPU - giving you fully hardware accelerated graphics performance.  Like almost everything in WPF, you can also use WPF databinding and animation on the properties of an effect (allowing them to be fully integrated into an experience). Applying an effect onto a Control is super easy - just set a Control's "Effect" property.  For example, to add a hardware accelerated drop-shadow effect on a button you can use the built-in <DropShadowEffect> on it via either code or XAML: Which will cause the button to render like so: Because Effects are extensible, developers can create their own custom Effect objects and apply them.  For example, a custom "DirectionalBlurEffect" could be created and added to a ListBox control to change its scroll appearance to use a blur effect if you rapidly scroll across it: Keep an eye on Greg Schechter's blog to learn more about how the Effects architecture works and to learn how you can both create and apply new effects within your applications (his first set of posts are here).  Note: In addition to introducing the new Shader Effects API, WPF in SP1 also has updated the existing Blur and DropShadow Bitmap effects already in WPF to be hardware accelerated. WPF Interoperability with Direct3D .NET 3.5 SP1 adds support to efficiently integrate Direct3D directly into WPF.  This gives you more direct access to the hardware and to take full advantage of the Direct3D API within WPF applications.  You will be able to treat Direct3D content just like an image within an application, as well as use Direct3D content as textures on WPF controls.  For example, below are three samples from the Direct3D SDK: We could either load them in as image surfaces within a WPF application, or map them as textures on WPF controls.  Below is an example of mapping them as textures onto cubes in a WPF 3D application: Note: the Direct3D integration isn't today's SP1 beta release.  It will appear in the final SP1 release. VS 2008 for WPF Improvements VS 2008 SP1 includes several significant improvements for WPF projects and the WPF designer.  These include: Several performance improvements Events tab support within the property browser Ability to sort properties alphabetically in the property browser Margin snaplines which makes form layout much quicker Better designer support for TabControl, Expander, and Grid Code initiated refactoring now updates your XAML (including both control declarations and event declarations in XAML) Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML The debugger has also been updated in SP1 so that runtime errors in XAML markup (for example: referencing styles, datasources and/or other objects that don't exist) will now be better identified within the debugger: Data Development Improvements .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 include a bunch of improvements for data development. Some of them include: SQL 2008 Support VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are being updated to include support for the upcoming SQL 2008 release.  Visual Studio 2008 data designers, projects and wizards now fully supporting connecting and working against SQL 2008 databases.  ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities: .NET 3.5 SP1 includes the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, which allows developers to define a higher-level Entity Data Model over their relational data, and then program in terms of this model.  Concepts like inheritance, complex types and relationships (including M:M support) can be modeled using it.  VS 2008 SP1 now