When it comes to Microsoft products lately, many don’t count a product released until the 1st service pack. Well, for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, the wait is over. Personally, I’ve been using Visual Studio 2008 since they were in beta and I contest it’s still one of the best IDE’s on the planet. The service pack adds some bug fixes and new features that are sure to make most .NET developers happy.

Download Visual Studio 2008 SP1 here.

Download .NET 3.5 SP1 here.

I haven’t had much chance to work with the service packs yet, so I can’t verify whether or not they live up to Microsoft’s claims (20-45% performance increase for WPF applications, and 20-45% decrease in cold start times). If you have any comments on the matter, positive or negative, please feel free to share.