Microsoft has released a set of Power Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office. It’s called v1.0.0.0 and it’s available at the Microsoft Download Center.

The download includes a set of reusable class libraries and a Ribbon IDs ToolWindow tool.

The following operating systems are supported:

• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Vista
• Windows XP

It is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007.

It’s been a few days since we checked up on the ongoing Microsoft-Yahoo saga. It’s beginning to look a lot like a soap opera after all.

• Microsoft has hired a law firm that specializes in proxy fights, which would in all likelihood see it try to oust the existing Yahoo Board of Directors and replace it with a board more sympathetic to its original offer of $31 a share. Hiring a firm for a proxy fight is seen as a much cheaper offer than upping the original offer for Yahoo. (BBC News)
• Both Chairman Bill Gates and Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi have affirmed their support for Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. Gates added that the company will focus its efforts on search even if the Yahoo bid doesn’t go through. (Reuters via InternetNews.com and CNET News.com)
• It turns out that many Yahoo shareholders also own Microsoft shares. This means they support they deal no matter what happens. (The Register)
• Yahoo’s board appears to be divided, with some members worried that CEO Jerry Yang’s vehement opposition to a Microsoft takeover is clouding his judgment of what might me best for the company. At the same time, the board appears to have cooled on partnering with News Corp. (NewsFactor Network) 
• Finally, Yahoo has drafted compensation packages for employees who happen to lose their jobs up to two years after the company undergoes a change of ownership. (CNET News.com)

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Microsoft’s efforts to attract young developers entered its latest, and biggest, stage this week with the announcement of the DreamSpark program.

Through DreamSpark, certified students can get free versions of the following products:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

As the DreamSpark site indicates, thus far the program is open to residents of 11 countries; alphabetically, they are Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

DreamSpark represents a huge expansion of Microsoft’s free product push, aimed primarily at students but at more casual developers. The move began with the Visual Studio and SQL Server Express editions and had been extended with the Web mashup tool Popfly.

There are a lot of handy Visual Studio 2005 add-ins out there that, for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons, have yet to be updated for Visual Studio 2008.

Before you go looking for replacement add-ins, though, you might want to check out a recent blog post by Mohamed Ahmed Meligy called Tip: Try this to make a VS 2005 add-in work with VS 2008. As the title implies, the author discovered a quick process for making sure that his Visual Studio 2005 add-ins would work on the newer version of the IDE.

The caveat here, of which Meligy is quite aware, is that this process may not work with all Visual Studio 2005 add-ins. Nonetheless, it certainly can’t hurt to try it out, especially if you have come to rely on a particular add-in so much that you think it’s part of the IDE itself.

All good things must come to an end. This is my final week as the site editor of SearchWinDevelopment.com.

It’s been a good ride — I’ve seen Ajax and Silverlight catch fire, I’ve covered two Visual Studio launches and, just to keep myself busy, I’ve been studying Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo — but it’s time for something new, so I’m moving down the row of cubicles to TechTarget’s Vertical Software Media Group.

Thus, now seems like an excellent time to introduce you to some of the new .NET Developments bloggers. If you recall, about a month ago I asked any and all interested parties to get in touch. Two people have started writing thus far — more on them below — and two more will get started soon.

Chris Madsen is a consultant who programs in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005. Her posts include They could have told me, in which she notes that, in the world of .NET developers, it’s 2005 and not 2008, and The elusive project properties, in which she describes a Deployment Project Properties treasure hunt.

Christopher Yager is a chief software architect who does most of his work in .NET 2.0. His first post, TFS to the rescue — almost, articulates his efforts to “[connect] our hand-rolled testing metrics program with our Team Foundation Server.” Look for an upcoming post on Windows Communication Foundation certificates.

Feel free to visit their entries and leave a comment or two. We’d love to hear what you think about our new additions to the blog.