Unless this is the first thing on technology you are reading in the last six months you will know that we are seeing a new server being launched by Microsoft. After the ups and downs of Vista (many love it and many hate it) I expect that Windows Server 2008 will be something we can all agree is a real bonus for .NET Developers. Whole issues can (and will) be done on the benefits that Internet Information Server 7.0 (IIS7) brings including really cool support for web farm (read highly scalable) and shared (read highly configurable) scenarios.

This will be the first OS to ship with the .NET Framework 3.0 (comes with Vista SP1 as well) which still confuses alot of people since the base class libraries in .NET 3.0 and 3.5 are still those we know and love from .Net 2.0. This means that most of the goodness that has been added are bolt on technologies like WCF and WPF, etc. I prefer working on an OS that has the technologies I am using built in which also leads to more confidence that Microsoft has really tested that it all works well together.

Lastly you should watch out for the promised source code that Microsoft is releasing for the base class libraries and many of the other libraries we depend on for so much including ASP.NET and ADO.NET.