Visual Studio 2008, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular integrated development environment (IDE), launched on Monday as reported by Somasegar. You can download the free C# Express Edition here. In a post today at the Windows Media Center Sandbox blog, Charlie provides some useful information for Media Center developers:

We put the template support in for Visual Studio 2008 towards the very end of the 5.3 development cycle as a ‘bonus’ to fulfill community requests — you’ll notice we don’t even mention it in the What’s New section of the SDK documentation at all since we didn’t know the street date for Visual Studio 2008.

He notes that if you only have one of the Visual Studio 2008 SKUs installed, then a template will be missing after installing the Windows Media Center SDK 5.3. To solve the issue, make sure you have a Visual Studio 2005 SKU installed alongside 2008 (they can happily live side-by-side). If you install VS2005 after VS2008, you’ll need to a repair on the Media Center SDK.

And as a best practice, install the Media Center SDK after you have installed the IDEs.

For more information on version 5.3 of the Windows Media Center SDK, see this post.

Back in August I mentioned that Microsoft’s HD Photo format would very likely become the new JPEG XR standard. Now it’s official! All that remains is the actual work of making the standard a reality:

“The country vote is done, and it passed,” Bill Crow said. “That means the International JPEG committee has decided to go ahead and create the standard. Now it’s just a process of doing that work,” a process that will begin later this month in a meeting in Kobe, Japan.

Support for HD Photo isn’t as broad as it could be, but becoming a standard will likely change that. Still, with support built into every copy of Windows Vista and a firm vote of confidence from Adobe, the future for JPEG XR looks very bright indeed.