An article I found through Gill Cleeren's Blog:

Web 2.0 Today

The web has been around forever in tech terms.  But nothing really revolutionary has gone on, besides marketing getting a hold of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and calling it AJAX.  HTML, CSS, the DOM has been around since forever as far as we web is concerned.  Where is the real revolutionary leap?  I mean, sure, you have a ton of Web 2.0 companies coming online, everyone and their dogs are doing start-ups these days, but it’s hard to get everything to work together.  Things are coined "AJAX" and "Web 2.0", but really, all these technologies are old!

Nobody has really stepped up to the plate and taken a total dominating stance on the web.  Google is pushing applications to the web to "compete" with Microsoft, but has anyone really tried to compete with them?  Is everyone missing the boat completely?

Why hasn't Google created development tools to develop "Google" applications?  Why hasn't Facebook?  Why haven't any of the so called visionary companies out there created a real viable platform for building web applications?  Some of you are thinking they have.  Nay Nay they definitely have not.  They have all created API's and very simple Wiki documentation surrounding their API’s. Sure the concept of Mashups, XML standards, Web Services is becoming mainstream, but has anyone really taken the time to BUILD the development tools that are needed to build Web 2.0 applications?  Has anyone taken the time, or the ridiculous amounts of money they have, to build a platform on which future web applications can be built?

Microsoft missed the boat on Web 2.0, and the Web in general, and are currently way behind on the advertising side of things, but they have a plan, believe me, and it’s deeper than people think.  What kills me (and almost makes me laugh), is that they have done it before, and nobody seems to see it coming!

read more: Link

One of my favorites is the possibility to open the containing folder through visual studio..

That last one is the most interesting to me. It includes hyperlinks to many sample projects on your machine. Clicking on "Visual C# Samples" will open a ZIP file that has two folders in it, one of them called "LinqSamples" that contains the BuildSamples.sln. Open that and you'll have 15 very interesting projects.

With this new feature in 2008 version of visual studio 2008, you can clean out all the references to assemblies that you are not using.

Hot Fix Details

You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download).  Below is a list of the issues it fixes:

HTML Source view performance

• Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
• “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
• Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
• Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
• The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

• Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

• Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
• Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

• When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

• Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.

Installation Notes

For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here.  In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error).

To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item.  Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’. 

If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".