Popfly Explorer has debuted into beta on the heels of Microsoft announcing the release to manufacturing dates for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. At Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007 in Barcelona, Spain, the Redmond company revealed that both Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are planned for general availability by the end of November. At the same time, Microsoft also unveiled the release of the first Community Technology Preview of Sync Framework as well as the beta for Popfly Explorer.

"Popfly Explorer which is an add-in to Visual Studio. This enables you to easily add a Silverlight gadget that you built using Popfly to your Web page and to easily publish your Web page to Popfly. In essence this makes it very easy for you to make your Web site look that much cooler," revealed S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.

The Popfly Explorer plug-in for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express is designed to allow developers to host a Popfly web site with the least amount of effort possible, integrate mash-ups with the web page, as well as provide remote access to Visual Studio solutions independent of location and platform. On top of these examples of functionality, Popfly Explorer also acts as a social networking tool delivering sharing capabilities. Popfly Explorer beta was accompanied in the test driving stage by the first CTP of the Microsoft Sync Framework.

"These latest releases are part of the broader Microsoft Application Platform, a portfolio of technology capabilities and core products that help organizations develop, deploy and manage applications and IT infrastructure. They also mark another major milestone leading up to the global launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Feb. 27, 2008, in Los Angeles," Microsoft stated.

Popfly Explorer can be downloaded from here.