What's New to .NET 3.5

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 contain a lots of new functionality and improvements

• VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support :VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. This means you can use VS 2008 to open, edit and build existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 applications (including ASP.NET 2.0 applications using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0), and continue to deploy these application on .NET 2.0 machines.
• ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support :.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in no separate download required. In addition to including all of the features in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 also now includes richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, ASP.NET AJAX integration with controls like and , WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements.
• VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support :VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express includes a significantly improved HTML web designer. This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration.
• Language Improvements and LINQ : The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.
• Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL :LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M [object relational mapper] in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model.
• Lots of other improvements :The list above is only a small set of the improvements. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox also. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data.
  Office development is also much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon, and with Outlook. Visual Studio Tools for Office support is also now built-into Visual.New WCF and Workflow projects and designers are now included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional. Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more...

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