Microsoft has made available for download the July 2008 Community Technology Preview of the Windows Live tools for Visual Studio 2008. Designed as an update to the February CTP, the July release features an expanded package, delivering additional items for developers, with the Redmond giant placing a great deal of focus on the inclusion of the Virtual Earth Map Control. Essentially, via the new Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (CTP) refresh, the company is ensuring that it has dealt with the bugs reported since the previous development milestone of the release, while also having updated the controls included in the package.

"The Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (CTP) allows you to easy drag and drop online services into your web site without worrying about any of the underlying goo," said Angus Logan, the technical product manager across all of the Live Platform APIs. "In this refresh we've fixed lots of bugs and added the Virtual Earth Map Control - you can now get the great interactivity of VE, with the power, and ease of use of ASP.NET with no JavaScript."

In addition to the Virtual Earth Map Control, the compatibility between the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer control and Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is also worth highlighting. According to Logan, developers will now be able to leverage no less than six additional ASP.NET Server Controls in order to integrate them into web-based applications: Contacts; IDLoginStatus; IDLoginView; Map; MessengerChat; and SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer.

The July 2008 CTP of Windows Live Tools is designed to integrate seamlessly with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 running on top of Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2. The resources streamline the process of making Windows Live Services an integral part of web applications via the collection of control add-ins offered.

The Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control "basically makes it much easier to get data from your database onto the map. Before, it was difficult to do because you would need to get the data into a specific format (geoRSS, JavaScript etc.) and then pass it off to your JavaScript code and then get the data into the map. Now, the control allows you to abstract all that work and get AJAX to handle the hand off," revealed James Senior, a Microsoft UK technical specialist.

Windows Live Tools - July 2008 CTP 0.1.0.0 for Visual Studio is available for download here.