Yes, its coming! The boys and Redmond can’t wait to release all these service packs. I have Scott Guthrie’s blog post in front of me and read it carefully. As for now these two downloads are still in beta but will be released soon in final stage. So far you can download it from here.

There will be some improvements that really concern us. I will closely follow these few:
– ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
– ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
– ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support
– ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support
– Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
– Improved ExtJS formatting support!
– Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements

As well as some Data improvements:
– SQL 2008 Support – VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are being updated to include support for the upcoming SQL 2008 release. Visual Studio 2008 data designers, projects and wizards now fully supporting connecting and working against SQL 2008 databases.
– ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named “Astoria”)

VB.NET update:
You can now add “XML to Schema” items to Visual Basic projects. On adding these project items a wizard will open that allows you to create a XSD schema set from a variety of XML sources. This schema set is then added to the project and it enables VB XML intellisense.

A XSD browser is also now included with VS 2008 SP1 and allows you to browse XSD schema sets. With the final SP1 release, developers will be able to right-click on XML element names (either in XML properties or XML literals) in the VB code editor and select “Go To XML Schema Definition” – this will open the XSD browser and display the schema set (and select the current element) for the VB project.