At last, I have a glowingly positive, happily cheerful and satisfyingly pleased entry instead of my usual rant.
I installed the Whidbey Beta 1 build yesterday, and immediately started checking out the beta of VSTOv2. After the grief I went through with the Smart Documents API, I wanted to see if the much-anticipated ActionsPane interface gives me a decent replacement.
Two hours of API-learning and online help-reading later, I had in my hands a rather neat (though not very innovative) CD catalog template, with a fully functional and interactive task-pane