Milestone 5

There are bugs! - But we didn't want to hold MS5 any longer since MS4 was released 9 months ago.
Express Users - VS Express is currently not supported. This is because the Express Editions do not allow Visual Studio extensibility. We have plans in the near future to provide some basic support to Express users. If you have VS Express, please use Milestone 4 for the time being.
Visual Studio 2010 - Visual Studio 2010 is not supported yet. We will be adding support in the coming weeks. Unfortunately the API has changed for 2010.
New proejct type - MS5 uses a new project type. Old projects need to be converted.

Integrated Debugger - Only breakpoints are supported right now. We are working on stepping, watches, and more.
Custom Project type - Cosmos has a custom project type now.
VMWare Player support - VMWare Player is now supported directly.

Stepping - Stepping (F10 or F11) will cause a crash of the guest. Fixed for next release.
Intellisense - Intellisense does not work in MS5. This is because Cosmos uses a custom project type. Fixed for next release.
Virtualization - Only VMWare Workstation and Player are directly supported in MS5. Others will be supported again soon, but can be used manually by mounting the ISO. ISO however isnt supported in this release, so you need to run the VMWare version and pluck the ISO from the output directory
Interfaces / foreach - Interfaces still are not supported yet, so you cannot use foreach.

Express Editions are not supported in MS5. Express Editions will be supported again in the near future (by end of August 2010). Please use MS4 until then.

Some Visual Studio 2008 distributions already have SP1 integrated. You may or may not need to download and apply this seperately.

Virtualization Environment
You will need a virtualization environment or physical hardware to run your Cosmos based OS on. Virtualization is easiest during development. Any virtualization environment (Hyper-V, VirtualPC, Bochs, QEMU, VMWare, etc) can boot the ISO created by Cosmos, however Cosmos has direct support for several of them. While any virtualization environment can be used to run Cosmos, not all support an integrated experience, nor the features required for Cosmos debugger. Because of its support for external control, serial ports, and GDB, VMWare is the recommended environment for development, debugging, and testing of Cosmos based OSes.

(free) VMWare Player - VMWare Player is free and provides all the necessary requirements for Cosmos.
(paid) VMWare Workstation - Provides more features, but none are necessary for the development of Cosmos based Operating Systems.