Microsoft's .NET and Visual Studio SP1: the wow starts now?

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 August 2008 12:00

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft claims a substantial performance boost for applications running in Internet Information Services 7.0, an improvement in application startup time of between 20 and 45 percent, a 10 percent improvement in overall application execution time, and support for Vista's Address Space Layout Randomization feature.

Translation: programs run faster and are more secure.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 incorporates support for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and SQL Server 2008, plus improved tools for dealing with WPF and AJAX applications, ADO.NET Entity Framework and JavaScript.

Don't worry if you're thinking "WPF? WTF???" Just be assured that this is all good stuff as far as Windows developers are concerned.

For example, Galen Murdock, president and CEO at Veracity Solutions, says Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 helped boost development speed by 60 percent on one project.

"The Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX improvements and new capabilities such as ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services meant we didn't have to worry about any of the underlying plumbing and could simply focus on building a highly responsive and interactive experience for users," he said.

ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework raise the level of abstraction for database programming, Microsoft officials claimed. In other words, programmers can think more in terms of what they're actually trying to achieve, and focus less on the nuts and bolts.

Most Windows users will probably prefer to wait until .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 appears in Windows Update, but if you're hot to trot it can be downloaded from this page.

Developers most likely know about Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but in case you need a link to the download, it's here.