VS SDK Momentum

We're picking up a lot of mometum with the Visual Studio 2008 SDK.  We have over 170,000 downloads of the Visual Studio SDK 1.0 and 1.1.  In comparison, the Visual Studio 2005 4.0 SDK has been around for a few years now and we've just passed half of its total downloads (337,000).  Our VS 2008 SDK was first releaesed in November 2007 and has steadily gotten over 10,000 downloads a month.

The Visual Studio Gallery has 757 entries as of now.  That's another amazing accomplishment having been only around since February.  Our main competitor which has been around for a few years has just over a thousand entries.  Hopefully we'll surpass them sometime next year.

I've been on the team for nearly 11 months now and I'm still in awe of how fast the community of VSX developers are growing.  We seem to be picking up new partners every week.  Our VSX Dev Conference was a huge success and 385 attendees left feeling excited and jazzed about developing extensions for VS.

On a sad note, James Lau (my boss on the VS SDK) has moved on to another team at Microsoft leaving a pretty big hole in the SDK.  James has been on the VS Platform and SDK team for five years and he decided it was time to try something different.  We definately wish him the best on his new role at Microsoft.  It's pretty c

VSX will continue to roll on though and we're continually trying to make the platform and tools easier to use for you to develop VS Extensions.  If you have any ideas on ways to improve the SDK, feel free to send me an email (link is on my blog).