The final March 2009 CTP for the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint (v1.3) has now been recently released.  Head on over to Paul Andrew's Blog (Paul is a Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint Team) for a rundown of the new capabilities available in this CTP.  Also with this release, we released a set of ten fresh new themes for SharePoint built as VSeWSS projects. Here’s a thumbnail of the new designs available to VSeWSS SharePoint Developers now.

Hi Software and Microsoft recently released version 2.0 of the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint. The intent of this solution is to provide a accessible development framework for Office SharePoint Server environments.

Key features of AKS v2.0 include:

• Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters.
• The Web Part Zone Control Adapter, a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts.
• HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML.
• Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines.
• Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
• French language version of AKS components.

The toolkit is freely available through the Microsoft Public License through CodePlex and can be downloaded at https://aks.hisoftware.com.