As announced over on the VS ecosystem blog, the V4 version of the Visual Studio SDK has just released.

You can download it here: Microsoft Download Center

For me, the highlight of its features, apart from DSL tools enhancements or course, is a Package Load Analyzer that helps you track down errors when something goes wrong loading your package. That's going to save so many folks such a lot of time - nice one SDK folks.

From a DSL Tools point of view this update is a bug fix release. Here's the broad list of things we've addressed:

• <Service> tag being inserted in csproj files
• Partition.GetClosurePrototypeGroup only works for single roots
• Connectors can become invisible when some files are reloaded
• Redoing "delete swimlane" causes crash
• BinaryLinkShapeSerializer now also uses SerializeId and UsesFullForm flags to decide whether to serialize the DomainRelationship moniker
• Resetting InitialHeight on a shape causes an error
• Can not use a property directly hosted on an element as the display string in the explorer
• Recursive embedding causes diagram map tool to crash
• Setting BaseRelationship in property grid can cause crash
• Context menu on shape can bring up an error dialog
• Incorrect warning in case of mutual embedding
• Validation warnings cause code generation to reported that it has failed
• Flushing undo stack is not reflected in user interface
• ClrAttribute dialog does not take the short form when specifying attribute name
• Accessibility bugs in redistributable
• Make "commentShape" an invalid name for xml serialization data for a DomainClass or Shape
• Grid lines cannot be seen in the Position property editor in high contrast mode
• Designer with a CustomEditor will not be able to use the ModelExplorer
• DEL key does not work correctly in the Custom Attribute editor
• Validation of identifier of ExternalType fails
• Various fixes to allow Copy/Paste to be more easily implemented in a DSL using custom code
• Various fixes to diagram performance under Windows Vista

This release is intended to be backwards compatible with our V1.0 release. In other words, if you install a designer built using the update release on a machine containing designers built with V1.0 they should still continue to work fine.  The V1.0 designers however may not gain the benefit of all the bug fixes in the update as some of them require the code to be regenerated from updated templates to get the benefit of the update.

Being an RTM release, these new pieces are fully redistributable.

The DSL tools team hopes you enjoy this release which will be the final one for the Visual Studio 2005 codebase.  Our next release will be based on a prerelease version of Visual Studio Orcas.