Visual Studio 2008 SP1 has been out now for a few days, and we must say we like it. It brings a ton of enhancements to the IDE and to the .NET framework; and these are the things that hit us the most:

• Better WPF Designers - there were a few bugs in the original ones and I'm glad to say they are fixed.
• Entity Framework - well we were waiting for this one for a long time. We can now start to build OR architectures with design tools provided by Microsoft. You might hear in the community that version 1 is not perfect, and they are right. Version 2 is coming out eventually and they are already discussing ideas for people to judge, see this rss feed. The team also has a wiki to gather community ideas.
• ADO.NET Data Services - AKA Astoria, this project exposes a Data Service in a RESTful way. It can basically expose anything that is IQueryable and offers hooks to manage security, transactions, updates, etc... There is a small tool that will allow you to recreate the object model on the client side and get away from using the URL mecanism to query the service. This new service will yield a few new nice architectures we am certain.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data - This technology will allow you to rapidly generate an interface from metadata attached to a business object. It's basically a scaffolding technique in order to rapidly generate data driven applications.

We suggest you install this service pack as soon as possible and use it with your forth coming developments. It is rare that a service pack brings so much new technology to the table and they are all welcome.