Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 has been released!

The Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 has been released! Woo hoo!!!

We've been spending a lot of time the last few months getting this out the door so we're all pretty excited about this release.

The Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 compliments the Service Pack 1 release of Visual Studio 2008. The SDK contains several new features such as:

· Significant size reduction for Visual Studio Shell redistributable packages. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables are now approximately 150 megabytes smaller. The redistributables no longer carry the full .NET Framework 3.5 payload. However, they contain a bootstrapper that automatically downloads the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime if it is not installed on the target computer.

· Support for progress feedback in a chained installation. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables can now pass installation progress back to the chaining process. This lets developers display accurate progress in their setup programs.

· Visual Studio Shell development now supports normal user. Developing and deploying a Visual Studio Shell application no longer requires the developer to be an administrator on a Windows XP computer or to have elevated privileges on a Windows Vista computer.

· DSL Print Preview. The ability to preview a DSL before printing has been added to the DSL designer.

· New XML Tree Editor sample. The SQL Server team has provided a new XML Tree Editor sample. The earlier sample has been removed.

· New TFS Samples.   Two new TFS samples have been added.

o VSExtensibilitySample

o This new TFS sample provides an example of creating a Visual Studio add-in that interacts with the Version Control user interface of Team Explorer. The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of such an add-in.

o RichClientCustomControl

o This new TFS sample provides an example of creating Work Item Tracking custom controls that work within Team Explorer. The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of custom controls as well as a separate document that describes how to write custom controls that can be used within the Team Server Web Access environment .

· Updated Shell documentation. Documentation about the Shell has been added.

In order to use the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1, you will need to install Visual Studio Service Pack 1. The Visual Studio Service Pack is available here.

Once you have Service Pack 1 installed, you can download the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 from here.

If you run into any issues, check out our online readme here.

Please download the SDK and try it out. 

Also, if you haven't already, sign up for our Dev conference coming up in September!

-Quan