By now, you have heard of all the great new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.  Now that you’ve developed your new applications, you want to include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a prerequisite in your Setup project or your ClickOnce installer. 

The default deployment experience in VS2008 SP1 is to download and install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center. However, you can add the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to the Visual Studio bootstrapper directory on your development computer, and make the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer available in the same directory as your application installer.

The steps to download the full .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and modify the product.xml file are detailed in How to Include .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 with Your Installer. While the blog entry was written initially to answer questions from an Office developer, these steps apply to everyone deploying applications developed with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Happy deployment!

Mary Lee, programming writer.