In case you haven't heard, Microsoft has formally announced plans to provide a service pack (SP1) for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of the year. There is a long list of items that will be included, but the most notable one to me was the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
I'll avoid repeating all of the information here. My intent was to simply help propagate the information to the masses. For all of the details, go read Brad Abrams' extensive blog post about the framework portion of the news. The WebDev Tools Blog also has a long blog post that details more of the Visual Studio portion of the release. You should also listen to the latest episode of Dot Net Rocks (Show #340). Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell interviewed Brad and Omar Khan about a lot of the details.
Over the next few months, I will be closely following this release and tinkering with the betas as much as possible. Once EF is officially released, I'm hoping to get it into my production environment as soon as possible.
It is an exciting time to be a .NET developer!