Thanks to Paul Andrew, SharePoint Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, for the heads up on the March CTP of Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) 1.3. According to Paul: "we added some default permissions to the BIN deployed project templates. So you can now F5 debug the web part BIN deployed project as soon as it is created".

Installation was a snap, just be sure to uninstall any version of VSeWSS first. As always, be sure to read the release notes. Here is a snippet from said document: "VSeWSS 1.3 includes a web service that needs to run as a member of the local Administrators group. The web service is used by the Visual Studio extension to communicate with SharePoint and is restricted to local connections only. As a security precaution the installer does not add the account running the web service to the local Administrators group. You must do it".

What this means in plain English is that if you have Central Admin running under the administrator account on your dev machine, then you don't have to do anything. Just accept the defaults during the install. More details of the install process available on Kirk Evans' blog.

Note that this is not an official release version so it is not supported in a production environment. This is the last CTP before the new generation of SharePoint tools arrive with VS 2010. Read more about this on Soma Segar's blog.

Be sure to watch Kirk Evans' new series of screencasts on SharePoint development using the extensions:

* SharePoint Developer Series - Part I
* Consuming SharePoint Lists via Ajax