Just little more than 3 months after beta 1, Microsoft released beta 2 of our favorite IDE!
This time, beta 2 contains a go-live license and includes full support for WPF and Silverlight applications. Scott Guthrie mentioned earlier that it's 99% feature complete.
Not only is Visual Studio upgraded to beta 2, the entire .net framework, at version 3.5, is now in beta 2!
So, what are you waiting for? Get downloading!
These are the install files:
Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition Beta 2
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition Beta 2
Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite Beta 2
Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Foundation Server Beta 2
Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Test Load Agent Beta 2
MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
And these are the VPC versions:
Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite Beta 2 VPC
Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite & Team Foundation Server Beta 2 VPC
Do know that latter are hefty downloads (as always...). You are recommended not to install this software on your production machine yet, it's best to go with a Virtual PC configuration, which you should give at least 1GB ram.
Further installation instructions can be found here.
Scott Guthrie dedicated an entire post to this release, which you can read here.
Update: It's perfectly possible to install VS 2008 next to VS 2005 without breaking VS 2005! An uninstall is also included to provide you the possibility to uninstall when the final version comes out later this year!