Scott Guthrie recently announced the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta.

I think it is good and all that they are building some nice new features, but I get this feeling that the naming of this release is going to cause problems. I suspect that most developers/users assume a service pack will contain bug fixes and maybe a few very minor features. I can see this becoming confusing for people where they have the .NET Framework 3.5 and can’t run something because they need SP1. This same issue has started to become a problem with .NET Framework 2.0/2.0 SP1, so I’m sure the same problem will occur on a much larger scale with 3.5/3.5 SP1.

Is it just me or should Microsoft really be going to .NET Framework 3.6 or something similar? Maybe developers will just have to start referring to 3.5 SP1 as 3.5.1.