Dan Rigsby – Coding Up Style

Back in the day before Visual Studio 2008 was released, there was a set of extensions you could install on Visual Studio 2005 to give you WPF, WF, and WCF templates, and other tools to work with .Net Framework 3.0. This set of extensions made it up to CTP 3 in November 2006.  However, when Visual Studio 2008 came out, these extensions never got any further attention.  So they never made it out of the Community Technology Preview cycle.  Microsoft wants everyone to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008.

You can still get the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) from here (for now):  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5D61409E-1FA3-48CF-8023-E8F38E709BA6&displaylang=en

However, the official link for Visual Studio 2005 extensions for.NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F54F5537-CC86-4BF5-AE44-F5A1E805680D&displaylang=en has been removed for many months.

So why is the link broken?  There have been a few posts on the MSDN Forums asking where these extensions went.  The basic answer is that, according to Microsoft, Visual Studio 2005 was never meant to be used to develop WCF, WF, and WPF.  Visual Studio 2008 is the correct tool to use, and on June 30th 2008, the license for this CTP expired (see this post).

While you cant get  Visual Studio 2005 extensions for.NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF) from the official Microsoft site, you can still find it at these locations:

• http://www.download.com/The-Visual-Studio-2005-extensions-for-NET-Framework-3-0-WCF-WPF-November-2006-CTP/3000-10253_4-10727672.html
• http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000375,39328336s,00.htm

However, due to licensing concerns, these links may go down over time too.  So, if you need these extensions, you will want to grab them soon.  But if you are doing any development in .Net Framework 3.0, you need to move to Visual Studio 2008.

Some companies out there will have issues with this, but you can still use .Net 3.0 technologies in Visual Studio 2005.  It’s just the tools that are no longer supported.