VS 2008 SDK and VS Shell runtimes available!

We are finally here! Following right on the heels of the VS 2008 release announcement yesterday, we are now announcing the availability of the VS 2008 SDK 1.0 release and the VS Shell (integrated mode) and the VS Shell (isolated mode) runtimes.

It's really great to get these releases out the door to VSIP partners and the VSX community. You can refer to our team blog for a list of new features in the SDK.

 A couple of important notes to be aware of with the new release:

1. VS Shell Development - if you are creating a VS Shell (isolated mode) based application, make sure you run Visual Studio with administrator privileges. This is required in version 1.0 of the VS 2008 SDK due to a known bug.

2. Run as Normal User in Windows Vista - we have enabled packages development as well as the use of samples in the VS SDK for normal users. We no longer create the experimental hive under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE by default. So after you installed the SDK, you can't run "devenv /rootsuffix exp" like how you used to do it with VS 2005 SDK. Instead, you need to run "devenv /rootsuffix exp /ranu" to tell Visual Studio to run the experimental hive under HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

For full details of other known issues and workarounds, please see the readme.html file in the VS 2008 SDK.

 thanks,
James