What's New in Visual Studio 2008 et. al.

Visual Studio 2008 was released today to Microsoft Partners and MSDN Subscribers. Below are a few links you may find useful:

Personally, I've been using the Orcas beta 1 & 2 virtual PC images for a while now. Though, it was limited to the Professional version not Team Systems (TS). There are several posts out there describing some of the nice new TS features such as code metrics, and profiling.

Some of the things I like about the new features include:

Visual Studio 2008 (Overall)

Improved load time and responsiveness. It's much faster!
More unit test oriented
New “Object Test Bench” to test objects without the need to do a build and run.

Visual Studio 2008 (ASP.NET IDE)

New JavaScript debugging and Intellisense
Improved HTML editor
Improved CSS editor

C# 3.0

Most of C# 3.0’s new features are either productivity–related or were added to support LINQ.

Auto–implemented properties — less typing!
Extension Methods — this will alleviate the need for some helper classes
Object Initializers — no need for copy constructors any longer!

LINQ

LINQ to XML — I actually used LINQ to XML in a project and loved it! It eliminated the need for any verbose serialization classes or tedious XPath. Once the XML Team finishes LINQ to XSD it will be even better.
LINQ to SQL — LINQ to SQL eliminates a lot of pain involved in data access, and gives the developer a lot of power and flexibility.