Microsoft will ship Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 by the end of November, the company revealed on Monday. Visual Studio 2008 is considered the release of Microsoft’s software development platform that is geared to developing for the Windows Vista OS. .Net Framework 3.5 features core development technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. Language Integrated Query (LINQ), which simplifies how database and XML queries are written in C# and Visual Basic, and ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), for building Web experiences, also have been planned for version 3.5. Microsoft also is changing the Visual Studio 2008 licensing terms to provide better support for interoperability with other developer tools and cross-platform scenarios, the company said. Partners are no longer limited to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only. A shared source licensing program for Premier-level Microsoft partners in the Visual Studio Industry Partner program will let partners view Visual Studio source code for debugging purposes and simplify integration between Visual Studio 2008 and partner products.The release of Sync Framework CTP, meanwhile, empowers developers to build solutions that enable peer-to-peer collaboration and online/offline synchronization. Also, Microsoft also touted the availability of Popfly Explorer, which adds integration into Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 and provides a way to add Silverlight gadgets built in Popfly to Web pages and publish HTML Web pages to Popfly. Popfly features online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups. Software Development