Messenger.NET - first releases!

Please head over here to download the first releases (v0.1.0 alpha) of both my client and library of Messenger.NET.

The library provides access to most of the standard features of the MSN messenger services in a simple interface. The client supports sign in (with multiple accounts through multiple instances of the program), manipulation of the contact list, and basic IM conversations. For full information on the features of the client and library, please view the release notes. I'm looking to improve both hugely in the near future, so look forward to more releases very soon! Also, I'm welcoming anyone with a good knowledge of network or GUI programming in VB.NET on to the team, so please reply to this post if you're interested.

Visual Studio 2008

I have recently installed the beta 2 releases of both VB.NET & VC#.NET 2008, and hoping to experiment with some of the more interesting to features like WPF and LINQ syntax, I found that I there were no templates installed at all. In fact, because of this, I cannot even create a blank project. The best I can do is create blank files in Windows Explorer and edit them, or upgrade existing projects. Now, of course I'm considering this a problem with my personal installation, but considering that I have a nice working copy of Vista installed (ignoring all its many usual problems, but remembering that VS.NET 2008 ought to be built for Vista) and that the Visual Studio Express MSI installers ran cleanly, I havne't been to impressed so far. I will keep investigating and post any solution I find here for others who may be experiencing the same/similar problems. To conclude: is this yet another reason to ditch development on Windows and move to Linux, where it's becoming almost as easy to develop in C# anyway? Anyway, perhaps you can look forward to some of my .NET projects being ported to Linux some time soon, especially Messenger.NET, which I'll be looking to bind to telepathy (most likely with telepath-sharp).