Yesterday, Microsoft released Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008. You can read more about it at Soma's blog post. The bits can be downloaded either via the public download site, or by MSDN subscribers via the subscribers downloads. Go get it now (that I've already gotten mine) and see how 2008 will help make your programming life easier when working with data.
A couple items of note with this release: It is supposed to be "feature complete" which means that the main differences between this release and the final version should be limited to bug fixes. Since it is feature complete, they are allowing for a "Go-live" license which will finally allow you to use LINQ and the other VS 2008 features in production environments, with the caveat that the go-live license entails.
Having worked with the LINQ technologies over the last year and a half, I'm glad to see this long awaited step finally coming. I may be a bit quiet over the next couple weeks as this release means that I will be making the final push to getting our LINQ book ready for publication. If you want to read our book while we work on it, sign up for the early access version now.
Crossposted from http://devauthority.com/blogs/jwooley/default.aspx