.Net Framework and VS Roadmap

.NET Framework 3.0

First, if we travel back in time to November of 2006, Microsoft released the .NET Framework 3.0.

.NET Framework 3.0 was installed by default with Windows Vista, however, it was also available as a installable component for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003.

Visual Studio Extensions

When we released the .NET Framework 3.0, we also released a couple of extensions for Visual Studio.

The first extensions, called the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation, provided templates and design-time support for creating workflows within Visual Studio. It is worth noting that this was a complete and fully supported set of extensions.

The second extensions were the Visual Studio Extensions for the Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation November CTP.

These extensions simply provided project and item templates for building WCF services and WPF applications.

ASP.NET Ajax

Shortly after the release of the .NET Framework 3.0, Microsoft also released the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 extensions.
These extensions are designed to enable web developers to build dynamic applications with ASP.NET 2.0.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5

It’s important to understand these out-of-band releases as we look at Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 include enhanced versions of the technologies that have been released out-of-band, such as AJAX and design time support for WF, WPF, and WCF applications.
At this point in time the beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are available.

It is also worth mentioning that there is a go-live license available with the .NET Framework 3.5. So you can deploy applications into production using this license. To be clear, there is a difference between licensed and supported. The .NET Framework 3.5 will not be supported until it is officially released.
Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are scheduled to be released at the end of 2007 and they will launch with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Februrary 27th.

Beyond the release of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
After the release of these technologies, there will be an update to the .NET Framework that will be released with SQL Server 2008. This update will add support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which will enable flexible data access to a variety of data stores.

Finally, next year we plan to release a major update to Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server codenamed “Rosario”.