I think that the increasing openess from Microsoft on what they are doing takes the edge of the hype.

For eample, LINQ was introduced 2 years ago and even though it just now is ready for prime, it feels like old news. Same with WCF, WF and WPF.

I think there are just so many new things that I've simply given up on them until they're officially released.

Part of the challenge is that, other than LINQ, there isn't much in there for encreasing productivity on existing applications. There isn't much new for Winform or ASP applications. Sure, there's AJAX support with intellisense and debugging, which is buzz worthy, but for standard ASP, there isn't as much new pieces as was introduced in 2.0. The integrated support for WPF and WF is great as well, but the buzz timing may be a little late. The biggest buzz at this point is Silverlight, but the best parts (1.1) aren't going to come out for some time now.

Personally my top 3 buzzworthy items in 2008 are: LINQ, Javascript intellisense and debugging, and WPF/WF support. What are your top 3 buzz items for VS2008?

Well, I can only comment in the context of my job, where we are still migrating from ASP & VB6 COM to .NET 1.1. .NET 3.5 is a million miles away. <sigh/>

Theres just too much coming out. I'm excited about Linq. WPF and Silverlight look like fun. But WCF, workflow, cardspaces? Boring.

And I dont think the rapidly incrementing version number is helping much. 2.0 to 3.5 in a year?

MS seems to be more open about features and more vague about release dates, "we will release it when it's ready".

Sounds kinda Agile.

Actually, I'm excited by all the new things that are coming out. I'm mainly a web guy, so more excited by Silverlight and ASP.NET Ajax then Linq or WF.

I was more excited by the 2.0 because ASP.NET 2.0 was light years from the 1.1, while now ASP.NET vNext (don't know which the version number will be) is just the same + ASP.NET Ajax

I think the biggest difference is also that now they are releasing new technologies as soon as they are available: ok, will be packaged for the official release, but with the 1.1->2.0 they added a lot of new thing together.

[Simone]

now they are releasing new technologies as soon as they are available

Do they?

I want C# 3.0 badly, for LINQ, expression trees, and lambdas. My excitement for those is pretty much limited to "I wish I could use this on a day-to-day basis", since I'm already using the Orcas beta. In terms of excitement, I'm all about the DLR and Silverlight, but they're still too new. I'm excited about WPF/XAML, but again, without it being a first-class citizen in Visual Studio, it's hard to convince anyone that we should use it.

I think most of us are too busy working and learning all this stuff to show excitement, but we are excited! Microsoft is releasing awesome technologies with .NET 3.5 that go far beyond what we previously had, and it's impressive to see how they all seem to fit together. Besides, do you prefer to be overwhelmed by new things or bored by lack of innovation? I prefer the former :)

I seem to differ with almost everybody in this thread.

I'd prefer smoother and less convoluted Asp.Net core to forthcoming bells and whistles.

If the core can't be undone, re-done or fixed, the boys of Redmond (BORs) should fork it into, as of now, Asp.Net 4.0. The BORs could keep on kludging version 3.x ad infinitum, but should give us a new elegant version 4.0

I think it has more to do with version number confusion rather than anything else.

If they rolled everything into one release there would have been more to excite the community as a whole. As it stands, MS has excited half of the community with 3.0 and half the community with 3.5.