Tweaked licensing terms to improve interoperability.
Microsoft has vowed to release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November.
S Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, promised improved tools and resources for developers, including a first Community Technology Preview of the Microsoft Sync Framework and new capabilities for Popfly Explorer.
Microsoft also announced plans to make additional investments targeting Visual Studio partners.
The firm said that it would change its licensing terms so that partners would no longer be limited to building technology on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms.
This licensing change will be effective for the release of Visual Studio 2008 and the Visual Studio 2008 SDK.
Microsoft also unveiled plans to create a shared-source licensing programme for Premier-level members of its Visual Studio Industry Partners programme.
The initiative will provide partners with the ability to view Visual Studio IDE source code for debugging purposes, and simplify the process of integrating products with Visual Studio 2008.