The (missing) Visual Studio 2008 SDK Reference

While I don’t write VS packages with the SDK, sometimes I need to use the SDK documentation to get an interface/service (most of the time to answer some question in the forums, or to do something that can’t be achieved with the automation model EnvDTE for add-ins). Since I don’t know by heart the name of all interfaces, I use the following page to search for an interface with some word in the name:

Interfaces
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb180708(VS.80).aspx

Notice that the page belongs to Visual Studio 2005 Visual Studio Visual Studio SDK Reference Visual Studio Platform Reference (you can navigate the tree to the left). For some reason, the page still displays the warning “[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]” but I can live with that.

When I navigate the tree to locate the equivalent for Visual Studio 2008, I never find it, so today I investigated a little more and I found the following page:

Visual Studio SDK Reference
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb166217.aspx

which applies to VS 2008 and where the “Visual Studio Platform Reference” link is not a link (neither the Managed Package Framework Reference link), and for that reason I guess it doesn’t appear in the tree too. The page still shows the warning [Note: This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.] and apparently is not updated since November 2007.

So, until the VS 2008 documentation is updated, you have to use the VS 2005 SDK reference documentation.