The Heroes Happen Here (http://HeroesHappenHere.com) launch event for Visual Studio 2008 happens this week.  As with the Visual Studio 2005 launch event this is a shared launch that includes Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.   Visual Studio 2008 actually released back in November of 2007 and since then we've all had a chance to start building applications.  The new features in Visual Studio 2008 are very powerful across the board, but those associated with Visual Basic and LINQ happen to be particularly powerful.  I'm sure the the launch will do a great job of showing off the new features, after all it seems like just last week at the Office Developers Conference that we were showing off several of the features related to created solution based on the Office 2007 products. (There was a truly awesome demonstration of the built in debugging capability of Visual Studio 2008 with custom MOSS workflows during the ODC that I happen to know a little about.)

I don't want to steal any of Microsoft's thunder related to Wednesday's launch event in LA, but instead to look beyond the current release.  Not way into the future (ie. Hawaii - a future version (next?) of Visual Studio) but something much closer - the coming updates to Visual Studio 2008.  That's right we haven't even gotten to the launch and of course the focus is already shifting to the next set of features.  This makes more sense when you consider that SQL Server 2008 - which is part of this week's launch event isn't actually releaseing until sometime in the 3rd quarter of 2008.  Thus I'm going to point out some things which it certainly appears will be releasing for Visual Studio 2008 at the same time as SQL Server 2008 releases.

Why do I say that - well the first example is a set of updates to ADO.NET to support the new features of SQL Server 2008 - http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/02/21/coming-soon-to-linq-to-sql.aspx Yes as part of the release of SQL Server 2008 ADO.NET will be getting updates to support the new data types which are going to be available.  The nice thing about that post is that it helps clarify those new SQL Server features which are most likely to be used by application developers right out of the gate.

On the other hand a single blog post really doesn't firm up that those enhancements have to arrive with SQL Server 2008 -  they might not arrive until say October or November or even later, rather it is the fact that we also have word on several other new Client features which are going to be releasing "this summer."  Scott Guthrie outlines several new enhancements to Visual Studio 2008's client model http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/19/net-3-5-client-product-roadmap.aspx 

I personally am very interested in some of the new deployment enhancements, but lets get real there is no way Microsoft is making more then one release of enhancements this summer so the combination of the two blog posts gives us a pretty good idea of when to expect the next set of developer tool updates (http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/98161/sql_server_98161.html).

It's nice to see that new tools and enhancements to Visual Studio 2008 are on the way even if as some at Microsoft admit the new tools are coming at a breakneck pace: http://blogs.msdn.com/rbarker/archive/2008/02/04/test-post-from-windows-live-writer.aspx  (btw, I'm planning to download the Live Writer SDK as soon as I get caught up and have some free time...)