Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM SDK Released

Earlier this week, Microsoft released the first upgrade to the latest iteration of its development platform.

MSDN subscribers were the first to get their hands on Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 RTM on March 8th, 2011.

Two days later, on March 10th, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM hit general availability, with the installer and the ISO images of the upgrade now available via the Microsoft Download Center.

At the same time, the Redmond company also upgraded the software development kit for Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

The Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM SDK can now also be downloaded from Microsoft.

“The Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK includes project templates that help developers create tool windows, menu commands, isolated shell projects, and editor extensions. The editor extensions include text adornments, colorizers, and margins,” Microsoft revealed.

“The Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK also includes build tasks that help developers build and debug extensions.

“Building and debugging are managed in a second instance of Visual Studio named the experimental instance. The experimental instance provides a test bed for extensions without changing the primary installation of Visual Studio,” the company added.

Developers that will install the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM SDK will be able to find all the resources packed by Microsoft placed conveniently under the Start menu in Windows, just as it was the case with previous releases of the SDK.

Devs will need to be running Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Professional or higher in order to take advantage of the latest version of the SDK.

Below they will also find the download links for SP1 RTM as well as the trial-versions of Visual Studio 2010, so they can test the platform after they upgrade it.

As is the case with any software development kit, the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM SDK contains documentation, samples, and additional resources.

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM SDK is available for download here. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.