Microsoft's 2008 service pack extravaganza is by no means limited to its flagship products, the Windows operating system and the Office suite. With Window Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, Office 2003 SP3 and Office 2007 SP1 out of the way, it is now time for the latest version of the company's suite of development products to get updated. With Visual Studio 2008 released to manufacturing at the end of 2007 and to the general public on February 27, 2008, alongside Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has moved onward to the Service Pack 1 milestone.

"Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is not finished yet, but we do have a beta version of the documentation ready for you to read! You can learn about some of the features that you'll see later this year when we release SP1", revealed Christin Boyd, Microsoft Program Manager. Lai Hoong Fai, Senior Independent Software Vendors Technology Advisor, Microsoft Malaysia, said last week that the first Beta for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will be accompanied by the first testing milestone for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta.

In the meantime, a taste of what Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will bring to the table is available via two MSDN resources titled "Extending Word Documents and Excel Workbooks in Application-Level Add-ins at Run Time" (available here) and "Event Logging (2007 System)" (available here).

"Starting in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can use the event viewer in Windows to see error messages that are captured by the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime when you install or uninstall Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions. You can use these messages from the event logger to resolve installation and deployment problems", Boyd added.

Outside of the official documentation, Microsoft is keeping Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on a short leash. As a matter of fact, SP1Beta of Visual Studio 2008 will ship to a select pool of 1,000 testers and will not be available to the public.