A new version of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK preview has been released. Among the new samples is a way to add WPF support to a .NET language.
Visual Studio 2008 will include a Shell edition. This edition, which is free to use and distribute, will allow languages designers to leverage the capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE for their own programming languages.
While language developers are not required to make their language .NET compatible, there are certain advantages to doing so. In addition to having access to the .NET framework itself, designers can hook into .NET capabilities such as the Windows Presentation Foundation designer. Other hooks include various parts of the Windows Communication Foundation features like service references and discovery and Data Designer Extensibility.
A lot of the Visual Studio functionality requires an expression evaluator. This version of the SDK includes a sample based on IronPython. IronPython, part of Microsoft's drive to support dynamic languages in the CLR, is also used for the WPF samples.
