I love .NET 2.0 and I am a great fan of it. But sometimes I have to develop WPF and silverlight applications, so I have installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. I am newbie to Visual Studio 2008, please tell me, can I completely target .NET 2.0 through Visual Studio 2008 Professional (as in VS 2005) along with .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5? Is Visual Studio 2005 is better or Visual Studio 2008?

I am waiting.... please tell me... I shall be highly thankful to you from core of my heart for this...

 .Net 3.0 and 3.5 are just extensions to the 2.0 framework that allow you to develop WCF and WPF applications. The 2.0 framework is still the core of 3.0 and 3.5 so there is no need to "target" unless you specifically want to select the 2.0 framework when you create a new project.

As for 2008 being better than 2005, that's going to be a matter of opinion. I know quite a few developer who are still using 2005 and are able to everything they need to do with no significant issues.

But which is better to target .NET 2.0: Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008?

Do Visual Studio 2008 provides more features for .NET 2.0 over Visual Studio 2005?

 Targeting is really irrelevant, since both 2005 and 2008 can choose 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 when creating a project. I only used 2005 for a brief period before swithcing over to 2008 but haven't noticed much in the way of differences.

 Here's an article that might help a bit - http://weblogs.asp.net/cschittko/archive/2007/10/08/visual-studio-2005-or-2008-what-s-more-risk.aspx

bottomless.wisdom:

Do Visual Studio 2008 provides more features for .NET 2.0 over Visual Studio 2005?

VS 2005 and VS 2008 provide exactly the same set of features for .NET 2.0. VS 2008 just adds 3.5 features on top of that. In terms of 2.0 functionality, there's no difference between 2005 and 2008.

its in the project properties.  Have fun.

2008 provides useful features than may come handy even if target is 2.0. Such as much better jscript intellisense or improved code intellisense in C# or better debugger - just to name a few, but there is much more.

VS 2008 also provides built-in unit testing (in case you do not want to use NUnit)

If you are using Resharper, it has a more extensive set of optimisations in VS2008.