'Twas the day of deployment and all through the house, a few creatures were stirring, mostly our developers. We just deployed our latest build of Popfly and Popfly Explorer, so it's a good time to tell you what to expect:

Popfly Explorer (the plug-in for Visual Studio)

• Integrated block creation. You can now create, debug, and publish Popfly blocks directly from Visual Studio. This is a huge advance for our block creators since you can use the powerful Visual Studio JavaScript editor rather than the Popfly block editor. Documentation for that is here.
• Block editor IntelliSense in Popfly Explorer. With full IntelliSense for creating the XML and JavaScript, producing a block description is now easier than ever..
• Improved search. In the past, Popfly Explorer search is a bit limited; the new search UI makes it easy to find projects of different types created by different people.

Popfly

• WSDL block generation. Point Popfly at a WSDL file and it will automatically generate the stub of a block.
• Panning. Ever opened a mashup in edit view and the blocks go off the screen? Well you can now scroll left and right. This one was, as you can imagine, a big customer request.
• Developer keys in preview. Wonder why your Facebook mashups don't show your friends in preview? So did we, and so we fixed it: Popfly now uses your developer key for any given service if you have one and only use our preview keys when you don't have one.
• Mashups mash more smoothly. We’ve improved the parameter matching when you connect blocks.
• Block editor preview. Get a quick preview of changes to your block by clicking the Save and Run button within the block editor.
• Documentation. We've been a bit remiss in documenting particularly the changes to the block creation experience. Now with the integration into Visual Studio through Popfly Explorer we've updated the documentation. And check out the documentation for advanced mode in the Mashup designer

Oh, and don't miss the live-action Popfly screencast.