Where is the January Release?

If you have been following what's going on with the Visual Studio platform and following releases of the Visual Studio SDK, you would know that our team has been releasing CTP releases monthly and RTM releases quarterly. So January just went by and where is the January CTP?

We actually decided to skip the January CTP release this month because we are busy wrapping up the VS 2005 SDK 4.0 RTM for releasing towards the end of this month. We are also going to be releasing our first Visual Studio Orcas SDK in early March. So our team is juggling both releases these days, and we believe skipping the January release is the right thing to do for our customers.

The VS 2005 SDK 4.0 RTM will be our final SDK release on the VS 2005 platform. I am very excited about htis release because it wraps up what we are doing on the VS 2005 platform, and it will also contain a ton of new features. The main things you will see when it comes out are:

• Toolbox Installer Package - this is a redistributable package that will enable toolbox component vendors to make their components appear in the toolbox. We have also built an end-to-end sample around how to use this package for you.
• SDK Browser - this is the new entry point to the SDK, and it replaces the old Samples Browser. The UI is totally updated, and it contains links to resources that we can update after the releases, enabling us to ship new samples over the web even after we ship the final release.
• Package Load Failure Analyzer - this is a new tool to help you debug package load failures. Now, when you package fails to load, you will know for sure whether it is due to a PLK error, a dependency failure or something else.

Other than the above, there are also other updates like Setup UI, IronPython and DSL Tools bug fixes, new Sandcastle documentation compilers, new TFS samples, etc.

I need to get back to work now. I look forward to talking to you more about our release in a few weeks!

- James