If you are currently running Visual Studio 2008, you should upgrade to a modern version (VS 2017 or newer) or, at minimum, isolate your VS 2008 machine completely from the internet.
: For the first time, Microsoft decoupled the IDE from a single version of the .NET Framework. This "significant advance" allowed developers to target older versions like .NET 2.0 while using the newest tools, ending the need to keep multiple IDE versions installed for different projects. LINQ (Language Integrated Query) visual studio 2008
XML literals, in particular, made VB 9.0 incredibly powerful for services and configuration manipulation, and it remains an underappreciated feature to this day. If you are currently running Visual Studio 2008,