Hey fellow developers,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that our team has just released the VS SDK 4.0 December CTP. You can go download this immediately from the here.

 Here are the highlights to this release:

  • New Toolbar Combo Box sample - demonstrates how to add various types of combo boxes to the IDE toolbar.
  • Updated Toolbox Installer Package sample - now also demonstrates how to integrate with Help for component vendors. 
  • Updated Setup - Help documentation is now an optional component. You can save time during the Setup by choosing not to install local Help and use the online Help instead.
  • IronPython Web site & Web Application Project sample improvements - IntelliSense works better within script blocks, setting breakpoints, jumping to error location from build errors, etc. 
  •  Various DSL Tools bug fixes

Try it out and let us know what you think. I need to warn you about a known issue about this release though. In this release, we are installing the IDE Test Host Adapter as part of the VS SDK Setup. This allows you to create integration tests for your VS Packages. However, for this feature to work properly, you will need to have one of the Visual Studio Team System SKUs. We missed putting in a check for this in the Setup, so Visual Studio will complain about it on startup if you have the Professional edition or below. But the error dialog is completely harmless and you can just tell it not to load the IDE Test Host Adapter add-in and it won't bug you again.

This is our last release in 2006.  We will be releasing VS SDK 4.0 RTM early next year.

 Here is a picture we took today at our team's little holiday celebration :)