Keyvan Nayyeri

Finally after the official release of .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, a few minutes ago Visual Studio Extensibility team announced the final version of Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 that works based on Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

You can download the newest version of Visual Studio 2008 SDK from here.

One of the main updates is, the reduction in the size of Visual Studio Shell redistributable packages that are now 150 MB smaller because .NET Framework 3.5 is not embedded in the installers anymore.

The other big change is support for Visual Studio Shell development as a normal Windows user. Previously you had to run your IDE as an administrator user to be able to develop a VS Shell application.

There are some other new features and updates that are listed on the official announcement.

Recently Visual Studio Extensibility has been experiencing quite days. The community is preparing for the VSX Developer conference in September and I heard that many developers have registered for this important conference hold in Redmond, WA. I’m sure you will find many good stuff at this conference.

Beside this, former VSX Community Program Manager, Ken Levy, left Microsoft to start his own start up company last month. Now James Lau has taken this important position to lead the community.

I hope that the VSX community can keep the amazing progress in the future. 2008 has been a fantastic year for this community but there is still a lot of space for improvements.