Microsoft today released SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, providing a significant range of updates to the development platform. The main new arrival, ADO.NET Entity Framework, had originally been slated for inclusion at launch, and gained notority for a "vote of no confidence" from the developer community. The technology competes with the likes of nHibernate by abstracting away the database layer to enable developers to write queries directly in .NET using a compiled query language LINQ.

Other improvements include performance enhnacements to the presentation framework WPF, support for the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 and a REST-based storage mechansim known as ADO.NET Data Services.

Find out more about the changes at Microsoft.com