World of Warcraft Meets Visual Studio 2008

In an bit of good timing for some holiday season downtime, Dan Fernandez has announced the first release of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft on CodePlex.

World of Wacraft supports user-generated utilities and interfaces, called AddOns.  Now we can use Visual Studio to help create our own:

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is an open-source development tool aimed to bring the Visual Studio experience to building World of Warcraft addons. This is the first release of the project and we have lots more ideas around how we can better improve addon development in the future.

AddOn Studio is a good example of what can be done with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell to create customized editing environments based on Visual Studio.  It offers the VS2008 design surface and has editor and IntelliSense support for both LUA and FrameXML, used by World of Warcraft add ons.

Check out Dan's post for more details and a link to an interesting demo video.  I also recommend running through the helpful tutorial that's included with the install.

I haven't played World of Warcraft since about Tech*Ed 07, when my "friends" Patrick Hynds and Duane Laflotte evilly tempted me back in, but something like this (and seeing what new AddOns the community can produce) might pull me in yet again.

Well, if only for a month...

-Chris