Microsoft is releasing to manufacturing the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 (Service Pack 1) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Aug. 11, and developers have weighed in saying the new offering enhances their capabilities for building and delivering applications.

Although Microsoft is delivering new functionality in these service pack releases, the offerings provide a host of advancements that might otherwise have been made into an entire new release, if not a "point" or "dot-one" release. Some early users of the technology have been able to build functional projects based on Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, using the more model-driven aspects of the technology, among other things.

In an interview with eWeek, Shanku Niyogi, Microsoft product unit manager for the technology, said the releases come nine months after the release of the .Net Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 and include a substantial number of updates based directly on customer feedback.

"With these SP1 releases, we're doing something a little different," Niyogi said. "We're providing the typical guidance, but we're also looking at customer feedback and the way people are building applications, and we're putting in building blocks to help them do that better. We're giving them a more model-driven approach to development."

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