Now that you’ve garnered your copy of Visual Studio 2008 from the many installfests we’ve run across the country, it’s time to put it through it’s paces and learn about all of the great new features found in both Visual Studio and .NET 3.5.

As a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, you’d think we would learn about all of our tools and technologies through a constant IV drip controlled by the product teams in Redmond. Sadly, that’s not the case. We have to drill into the same material that you have access to. One of those items that has helped provide me with a structured learning path is the Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit. This training kit was created out of a 5-day lab that was held for early-adopter customers and partners back in the fall. It contains 20 hands-on labs, 28 presentations and 20 *scripted* demos! It has a wealth of information including topics on LINQ, C# 3.0, VB9, WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server (phew!).

If that’s not enough, you can also check out the Visual Studio 2008 Learning Portal where they have a free e-book on LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight that you can read at your leisure. If you’re a web developer and like the more semi-formal training approach, there is also a free e-learning course on ‘Developing Enhanced Web Experiences with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions’.

If you don’t have your hands on a copy of Visual Studio 2008 just yet – well, come to one of the many launch events coming up and you just might walk home with one – but you can get your hands on some training with the Visual Studio 2008 Virtual Labs. The folks over at MSDN Virtual Labs have taken a few of the Training Kit labs and turned them into virtual labs. A virtual lab allows you to kick the tires of Visual Studio without installing the bits on your machine. These labs include:

• What’s new in C# 3.0?
• What’s new in Visual Basic 9?
• Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008
• Mapping Your Objects to Database Tables with LINQ to SQL
• Client Application Services
• Workflow Enabled Services and Other New Features in the .NET Framework 3.5

All of this should keep you busy for a while. It’s certainly keeping me busy. Sometimes I wish there was an IV drip that would me absorb all of this faster.