Microsoft Nov. 19 released to manufacturing its Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant released the latest version of its development toolset on time, two years after delivering the previous version of the technology, Visual Studio 2005. The technology is available to MSDN subscribers.

Company officials said Visual Studio 2008, code-named Orcas, contains more than 250 new features and delivers significant enhancements in every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System, to enable developers of all levels—from hobbyists to enterprise development teams—to build applications. The new development platform provides a consistent solution for developing applications for the latest platforms, including the Web, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office system and more, the company said.

In the Orcas release, Microsoft has made Web development easier with new support for Web server communication techniques for AJAX/JSON (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and JavaScript Object Notation) enabled Web sites. Also, new ASP.Net controls allow for better page management and templates, and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) delivers native support for RSS and REST (Representational State Transfer).

Dino Chiesa, Microsoft's director of marketing for .Net, said Microsoft's push to improve Web development reflects the momentum around Web 2.0 and the company's investments in its infrastructure to support Web 2.0 applications.

.Net Framework 3.5 also delivers several new features, including capabilities for Web 2.0, SOA (service-oriented architecture) and software-plus-services-based applications, the company said.

A new programming model simplifies building workflow-enabled services by using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. This allows .Net Framework developers to build business logic for a service using Windows Workflow Foundation and expose messaging from that service using WCF.

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