Hot on the heels of the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework SP1 releases, Microsoft has now made available for download Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1. Marking the evolution past the Beta development stage, the Software version 1.1 of the Development Kit for Visual Studio 2008 is tailored specifically to the SP1 release of Microsoft's suite of development tools. The gold code of Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 went live as of August 20, and is designed to supply developers with the necessary resources, from documentation and samples to tools, in order to support building extensions for VS2008 SP1.

"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," noted Quan To, program manager Visual Studio Extensibility. "In order to use the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1, you will need to install Visual Studio Service Pack 1. Once you have Service Pack 1 installed, you can download the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1."

Permitting developers to play around with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 extensibility features, the SDK brings to the table a number of enhancements compared to the previous version, labeled 1.0. In this regard, Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 offers updated Shell documentation and two new TFS Samples, but the improvements are not limited to just these items.

"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); support for progress feedback in a chained installation; Visual Studio Shell development now supports normal user; DSL Print Preview (the ability to preview a DSL before printing has been added to the DSL designer); new XML Tree Editor sample," Quan To added.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 can only integrate directly on top of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, starting with the Standard Edition or above, as Express Editions are not supported, Microsoft informed. In addition, all previous variants of the SDK have to be removed prior to installing version 1.1, even v1.0 and the Beta builds.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 is available for download here.