Warning! Silverlight 2.0 Beta or Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta?

When you have two overlapping technologies, in this case Silverlight and Visual Studio, both with betas there is the risk that things won't work together. It's happened this week so you may have to make a choice. Don't go for the Visual Studio Service Pack 1 Beta (which came out two days ago) or the Silverlight 2.0 Beta. The Visual Studio SP1 Beta is quite extensive and includes support for SQL Server 2008, new ADO.NET features, improvements to the WPF designers, WCF templates for Silverlight projects, debugger support for the .NET Framework public symbols and source release, control improvements and Visual C++ improvements such as the Office 2007 Ribbon bar etc (and I'd guess the TR1 features).

Of course this depends on how much you value these features or want to wait until the full version is ready. If I'm developing software I'd prefer not to change horses mid-stream, especially if I'm working on an important development. There is nothing worse than being held up by a bug that is an artifact of a beta!

• Link to What is a Compiler article