Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is history and Microsoft actually hit its public milestone for the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version.

Nice work from the Developer Tools division in Redmond and Soma must be grinning like a Cheshire cat! It’s almost enough to banish the memory of waiting months on end for Visual Studio 2005 to hit the stands…

If you’re in the mood for announcements, let me add that InnerWorkings has just jumped on the RTM bandwagon by updating our learning content for Visual Studio 2008 RTM. Beta 2 is no more, and we now support the fully released version of the IDE.

So how about some useful resources for .NET developers looking sideways at the benefits of using Visual Studio 2008? Well, the first step is to get your hands on the IDE and you’ve basically got two choices:

1. If your company subscribes to MSDN, skip over to My MSDN Subscriptions and pull down your copy of VS 2008. 
2. Alternatively, you can just grab a free trial copy of VS 2008, which is good for 90 days.

Once you’ve got VS 2008 in your hands, what’s next? Maybe you’d like to learn how to use it perhaps? Well, of course you can take matters into your own hands and use InnerWorkings to get you started on the following core areas of VS 2008 RTM:

• New Features in C# 3.0
• LINQ to SQL with C#
• New Features in VB 9.0
• LINQ to SQL with VB

In addition, everyone is talking about Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 RTM Training Kit, which Eric Nelson’s blog first pointed me towards. There’s a ton of free hands-on labs, product presentations, and scripted demos for you to enjoy.

Speaking of free stuff, InnerWorkings has teamed up with Microsoft’s Readiness team to offer several free samples of our VS 2008 learning content. It’s just a taste but you’ll get some quality learning challenges, free as a bird, for a limited time only. Look out for this offer on the MSDN homepage very soon - you heard it here first.

I’ve been told that quite a few people struggled to uninstall previous versions of Visual Studio before loading up VS 2008. Microsoft has created a few sets of instructions for managing this problem:

• Uninstalling previous versions of Visual Studio 2005
• Uninstalling previous versions of Visual Studio 2008

For a more human description of this problem, check out Scott Guthrie’s post on the steps required to uninstall VS 2008 Beta 2 before jumping headlong into the RTM install.

So that’s it for now - good luck to those who plan to explore Visual Studio 2008 now that it has reached the RTM milestone. InnerWorkings will be along for the ride too, so let’s see how the product is received once the buzz of its ‘new release’ status subsides.

For my next post, I’ll be looking at how Soma’s Developer Tools team approached the build, testing, and release (on time) of VS 2008. There are plenty of interesting tidbits and strategic decisions that went into this release, so stay tuned for that one…

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