Well well, the inevitable question. Let's just say that you would be out of your mind to not consider upgrading to the upcoming 2008 version. With all of the cool new features that where added, plus it seems that stability has been improved quite a bit (and this is just the Beta). One thing that was a challenge was when I would create an Alignment or Profile, you are asked to select a Style for the object you are about to create. Well knowing me I always select the wrong style and need to change it. It used to be that if you wanted to change the style of an object, midway through a design, you would have to exit out of the command then reselect the object and access the object properties to change the style. Not anymore, it seems that when you are creating Alignments and Profiles, you are able to pick on the object and right click, while the toolbar for creating the object stays open. This is just one of the many minor items that they have changed. Now one of the major items that was added was the Plan & Profile Wizard. This thing is simply amazing and easy to use. Of course it is based on Styles so by taking a little time on the front end can really save you a ton of time when it comes to setting up sheets. It also gives the user the ability to add Match lines, plus shade the adjacent areas that are not supposed to be shown on the current sheet. More on this later!
It also seems that there has been a whole host of surface features added such as Exporting to DEM, Draping Images, Moving Blocks to Elevations, just to name a few. What is interesting about the Point and Surface menus is that they have grown quite a bit, in length. In the 07 version if you wanted to create Points on an alignment you used to have to run the Create Points command just to bring up the toolbar. Which could turn into quite a pain if you where setting a lot of points. About midway through the year I posted a utility that I found on the Discussion Groups for rotating points, which worked great but it seems that you can FINALLY rotate points around the marker point without having to add some other routine to do it for you. Plus, the label flips according to your Plan Readability Bias.
All of the Swap Edge, Add Point, Modify Point, Paste Surface, just to name a few have all been added to a new menu item called Edit Surface. It also is nice to have all of the Surface Labeling features available without having to run the Add Labels command.
One of the last items that I will talk about for this post is the new Lines/Curves features. We now have a whole list of items that we can create all kinds of line work the way we used to in LDT but with a twist. Well I am certainly not done highlighting these features but I am done for now. Enjoy!
A while ago I wrote a post about how AutoCAD users could Xref from Vault which seemed like a slick little option for those of us that wanted to introduce Vault into our workflow. What was weird is that this option was only available in vanilla AutoCAD and not available in Civil 3D. Well our wait is over and I am here to tell you that from the looks of the Preview version, Attach from Vault now shows up in the Xref palette. By having this option available you can attach or overlay any drawing that has been added to your project, plus it it still gives you the option to 
Bind, just in case you need it. In addition, you also have the ability to Check the file out while it is attached to your drawing, just in case you need to do a Xref Edit. As you can see there really isn't a limit on the types of files that you can add to your drawing.
