Microsoft very much wants people to get a head start with getting familiar with its upcoming Windows 8 so that everybody hits the ground running when the operating system launches later this year. The company has been letting loose some developer tools into the wild lately like tools for developing Metro style apps and now the company has released the Microsoft Advertising SDK Release Preview in order to start buttering up advertisers.

Ian Ferreria, a group program manager with Microsoft’s Ads Research & Development team, made the announcement yesterday in Microsoft’s advertising blog:

Amongst other improvements and bug fixes this release includes drag and drop support for both Visual Studio 11 and Expression Blend as well as additional creative capabilities that can be leveraged to create compelling and relevant consumer experiences. For more details, browse our documentation here.

We listened to developers and made some minor API changes based on the feedback. One breaking change is around error handling. We have included an error code to help developers manage the experience i.e.

var errorEventHandler = function (sender, evt) {
// use either or both of evt.errorMessage or evt.errorCode

We have also made investments in creativity with a new set of experiences that advertisers will be able to enable via the Microsoft Advertising SDK.

Microsoft has also stated that while it doesn’t expect the APIs for the Advertising SDK for Windows 8 to differ significantly between the beta releases and subsequent releases, it does point out to developers that they’ll need to repackage the app after the official release in order to receive payouts. Regardless, the company offered up walkthroughs for deploying ads in an app using either HTML5/JavaScript or XAML/C#.

The company is planning to launch two different editions of Windows 8 as well as Windows Enterprise. Some sources associated with Microsoft have said that they expect the new operating system to be launched around October later this year.