Pedro Silva's Blog

Development lead on Visual Studio Platform team focusing on the extensibility of Visual Studio.

Cool Extension: Modeling Feature Pack

Microsoft just recently released the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/18/2010

Cool Extension: VS2010 Pro Power Tools

We've just released the new Pro Power Tools which is a collection of useful extensions to make your...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/11/2010

Extension Manager Feedback

Now that Visual Studio 2010 is available, it would be great to get more feedback on the new...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/02/2010

Nice Review of the Extension Manager

Chris wrote a nice review of the VS2010 Extension Manager feature at TechRepublic. Having worked on...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/01/2010

Cool Extension: Extension Analyzer

Have you ever created a VS Package, tried to run it in Visual Studio only to get the infamous...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/27/2010

Creating Custom StartPage Extensions

I've been working on a custom start page sample that creates a new tab on the typical Visual Studio...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/05/2010

Cool Extension: Power Commands for VS 2010

For all of you fans of the Power Commands extension, Lance, from our team, just updated this...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/04/2010

How To: Launch a URL in the Visual Studio Internal Browser

For the sample extension that I'm working on, I wanted to have the ability to launch a URL in Visual...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/26/2010

How To: Get a ServiceProvider from the VS Start Page

When working with Visual Studio extensibility, getting a ServiceProvider is the main way to find and...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/21/2010

Cool Extension: Custom Start Page Template

For those that have seen Visual Studio 2010, there is a fancy new start page that is much more...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/19/2010

Visual Studio 2010 and SDK are available

After 2+ years in development, Visual Studio 2010 became generally available today. Also available...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/12/2010

Visual Studio 2010 and SDK RC released

Today is the general release for the Visual Studio 2010 RC. There's been a lot of performance work...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 02/10/2010

Cool Extension: New Export Template

This is a new tool that will make creation and packaging of project and item templates a whole lot...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 01/18/2010

Cool Extension: SQL Azure Explorer

I was just looking through some new extensions on the Visuals Studio Gallery for VS2010 Beta 2 and...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 11/06/2009

Visual Studio 2010 SDK for Beta 2 Now Available!

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 SDK is now available for everyone to use from the Download Center. So,...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 10/21/2009

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Available

We announced today the availability of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 on MSDN. Later this week, on...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 10/19/2009

Cool Extension: Vim Emulation

Jared just released a cool new editor extension for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to provide Vim editor...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 09/09/2009

Online Templates for the New Project Dialog

ScottGu recently posted about the new online templates feature of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta1. The...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 08/28/2009

New Project templates of VS-MEF integration

Pablo Galiano has just published two you project template extensions for the Visual Studio Gallery,...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 07/13/2009

MPF for Projects released for VS 2010 Beta 1

Chuck England has just recently posted the sources for MPF for Projects on CodePlex. If you're...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 07/09/2009

Look Ma, No More PLKs!

For those of you trying out Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you may have already noticed... But, Visual...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/19/2009

Update to AboutBox Extension

I recently posted an update the the WPF AboutBox (CS) extension (v 0.4) on the VS Gallery. You can...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/10/2009

Aaron Posts on VSIX Project and pkgdef Files

Aaron (one of the developers on my team working on the SDK) just wrote a couple of great posts for...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/09/2009

Creating an Item Template Extension (Addendum)

There are a couple of other ways to create project/item template extensions besides using the VSIX...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/08/2009

Creating an Item Template Extension (Part 3)

The VSIX file we created in Part 2 is the new unit of deployment for extension in Visual Studio...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/07/2009

Creating an Item Template Extension (Part 2)

Now, that we have a zipped up item template (from Part 1), how do we get this thing ready for the VS...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/04/2009

Creating an Item Template Extension (Part 1)

I’ve put together a WPF AboutBox item template and released it on the Visual Studio Gallery. It’s...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/03/2009

Quick Tutorial on Building Extensions with the VS SDK

It's pretty cool when you General Manager is out working with the bits you just released. Jason just...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 06/02/2009

I just created an new Item Template for the WPF AboutBox that I've been discussing in this blog. The...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/28/2009

The DSL Beta1 SDK is out!

Well lots of announcements this week with the VS Beta coming out... so here's one more: The Visual...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/22/2009

Early Buzz on the VS SDK and Extension Manager

Well for the first couple of days of being out, we've been getting some good usage and feedback of...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/21/2009

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 Available!

It pays to be in early in the morning... sometimes you get to be the first to announce. :) The...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/21/2009

Visual Studio 10 Beta1 Available!

The Visual Studio 10 Beta1 is generally available today from MSDN's Download Center... get it while...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/20/2009

Coming Soon Visual Studio 10 Beta 1

Well if JasonZ can blog about it, I suppose that means I can too. :) He talks about some changes in...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/14/2009

WpfAboutBox: Dialog Layout and Styles

I wanted to make an AboutBox that is as easy to use as the one that comes with Winforms. But, I also...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/08/2009

WpfAboutBox: Intro

I've been testing out some of the different possibilities in WPF with a sample AboutBox -- every...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/06/2009

Programmatic Access to XmlDataProvider

It’s pretty easy to set up an XmlDataProvider as a resource in your WPF application. This lets you...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/04/2009

Windows 7 RC is out

The Windows 7 Release Candidate just came out yesterday. I've been using builds of Win7 on my laptop...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 05/01/2009

Changing blog layout

Well, I tried using a prettier stylesheet layout for my blog, but it's not very good at should code....

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/29/2009

A WPF Dialog Window

I’m continuing to work through learning more about WPF and XAML. I was trying a simple dialog and...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/27/2009

Comic Sans typeface

Apparently there's quite an upheaval over the Comic Sans typeface... with folks even wishing to ban...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/22/2009

Low Bandwidth MSDN Pages

I just read over on Scott Hanselman's blog that there's a new low bandwidth view of MSDN pages. This...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/20/2009

WPF LinkLabel

WPF doesn't have a built in LinkLabel control as you'd find in WinForms. But, I have found a couple...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/17/2009

An old friend talking about Perf

I was just reading over some blogs and ran across a couple of interesting topics on usage and perf...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/15/2009

Learning WPF

I'm finally starting down the path of learning WPF (yes, I know that I'm a little late to the party...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/14/2009

Happy Easter

Had a really good week talking with a lot of customers at our VSIP clinic. Met a lot of the folks...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/10/2009

VSIP Developer Clinic Next Week

There's a VSIP Developer Clinic here in Redmond next week (Mon-Wed). I'll be attending and looking...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/03/2009

Introducing VS Extension Manager

In case you missed it, Jason Zander posted a while back about the Visual Studio 2010 new look. In...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 04/02/2009

T4 Editor Beta Released

The folks at Clarius have an update to their T4 template editor. They're now in Beta. It's a very...

Author: Pedro Silva [Visual Studio] Date: 10/18/2007

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