News just hit that Microsoft will be releasing SP1 for Visual Studio and .Net Framework 3.5 by the end of the UK summer. This comes only 6 months after the official launch of VS 2008.
Microsoft says that this won’t be a simple update, but almost completely restructure the two products. The .NET framework, which was originally designed to work on Vista, will shrink in size, 85% to be exact, and will be easier to download and better adaptable to XP now.

Another big change that will come with SP1 is that it will make web based developing a lot easer. Some insiders say it has been designed to make working with objects and SQL connections a lot easier than its ever popular rival Dreamweaver.

In short, SP1 will drastically minimize the amount of time and coding it takes to retrieve and write information to a database. Out of the box SP1 will connect to SQL Server 2008, MySQL, IBM’s DB2 and Oracle.