Aaron Marten : Visual Studio Shell

All Your RegKeys Are Belong To Us

aaronmar — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:39:00 GMT

I’ve been in many discussions lately with various folks about Visual Studio 2010 extensibility. Inevitably, someone suggests a solution to some problem involving changing/adding/deleting a registry key/value for an extension. If you need to do this, just remember this one rule:

Do not ever edit a key that ends in “_Config”

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0

This key contains your user-specific settings and works the same as it has in prior VS releases. This could be things like pointers to your default project locations, window layout data, etc… In general it is OK to make tweaks to this key. The worst thing that could happen is that you end up corrupting your user settings. Deleting the key will cause the first-launch “Please choose a profile” dialog to come up the next time you launch Visual Studio.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0_Config

If you examine the contents of this key, you’ll see that it contains the configuration data for VS 2010. This includes things like package registration, project system registration, editor factory registration, etc… You may also notice that the contents are very similar to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0.

You can think of the _Config key as a volatile cache of VS’s configuration data for a particular user. It is simply the combination of HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 and any pkgdef files coming from VS extensions (either from Common7\IDE\Extensions or %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions).

(A previous post discussed how the Experimental Instance works.)

If you edit a key in 10.0_Config, Visual Studio will (quite possibly) delete it on startup.

If you need to change a value, always do one of the following:

Edit the value under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0
Edit (or add) a pkgdef file for the extension in question (For managed VSPackages, this is likely editing/adding a RegistrationAttribute in your code).

Pkgdef and the Experimental Instance in VS 2010

aaronmar — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:42:16 GMT

***Disclaimer: This information is about Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 only. The following may not be accurate for future releases.***

One of the new features we introduced with the Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell was the concept of a pkgdef file. Pkgdef is essentially a REG file with tokenization. For example, you could put $RootFolder$ in your pkgdef file to refer to the root directory of your isolated shell application. At runtime, these files are consumed by the VS Isolated Shell runtime and merged into the registry (with the tokens replaced by literal values). The registry merely acts as a cache of the information in your pkgdef files.

In Visual Studio 2010, the pkgdef model has been integrated into Visual Studio itself. As such, the manner in which your packages are built and (locally) deployed when developing with the Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 is significantly different (although the “F5 experience” should be the same).

Visual Studio Startup / Pkgdef Merge

On the very first launch of Visual Studio, the first thing that needs to happen is merging the pkgdef files into the registry. You can think of the destination registry key where these go as merely a cache used for performance. The fact that it’s a registry key is somewhat of an implementation detail. Here’s a graphical view of what happens:

Note in the above diagram that the cache location is under KHEY_CURRENT_USER, and that the key name is 10.0_Config. If you view this key in regedit, you’ll notice a sibling key named simply “10.0”. This 10.0 key holds your per-user settings (things like your personal preferences for fonts, window position, and other options).

In comparison to Visual Studio 2008 and running with the /ranu switch, these 10.0 and 10.0_Config keys map to the UserSettings and Configuration keys under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 respectively.

It is a completely safe operation to delete the HKCU\…\10.0_Config key since Visual Studio will re-create it on the next launch.

“Experimental Instance” Startup / Pkgdef Merge

A very similar process happens when you run “devenv /rootsuffix Exp”. Instead of merging the pkgdef information to “10.0_Config”, everything is merged to “10.0Exp_Config”:

What are the “Pkgdef Files on Disk” locations?

There is a file called “devenv.pkgdef” in your VS installation folder (under Common7\IDE) that defines where pkgdef files are picked up from. First, pkgdef files are picked up from a few sub-folders under Common7\IDE. Secondly, you’ll notice that we scan a folder called “$AppDataLocalFolder$\Extensions”. On my user account this maps to:

C:\Users\aaronm\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions

When running with “/rootsuffix Exp” this would be:

C:\Users\aaronm\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0Exp\Extensions

In order for a pkgdef flie in the per-user location to be picked up by VS, it must also be declared as owned by a VSIX-based extension and enabled in HKCU\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ExtensionManager\EnabledExtensions. When you build a VSPackage or MEF component from one of the project templates in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK, this is all happening for you during the build.

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1

aaronmar — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:04:55 GMT

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 is now available for download. Be sure to check out the latest supplemental readme as you’re likely to encounter some of these issues in using the SDK.

Extension Manager

aaronmar — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:40:40 GMT

One of the new features we plan on shipping for VS 2010 that I've been heads down on for the past few months is the "Extension Manager". I'll be posting more details about it here over the next several months.

For the meantime, you can hear more about it (and see some very early mockups) in Dr. Tim Wagner's PDC talk. The part about the Extension Manager starts around 50:20. The earlier parts of the talk discuss some of the other new features that we're working on, including the new MEF-based editor extensibility model, the VS Gallery, and a general introduction to VS extensibility.

BooLangStudio

aaronmar — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:47:44 GMT

The Boo programming language now has a Codeplex project called BooLangStudio which adds Boo intellisense, project templates, etc… to Visual Studio. Cool!

Package Load Key Generator

aaronmar — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:38:14 GMT

Recently, we published a simple web page that will generate a Package/Shell Load Key for you immediately. No more waiting for an email to arrive, logging in with Live ID, etc…

VSX Videos on Channel 9

aaronmar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:08:24 GMT

Yesterday, Ken Levy and I sat down with Dan from Channel 9 to have an unscripted discussion about Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) (including finding a bug live during an untested, on-the-fly demo!). We also discussed creating your own Visual Studio Shell and show off how to add a new package to a VS Shell application, among other things. Check it out:

Ken and Aaron discuss VSX

In another video, Anthony and Ken also show off the Visual Studio Gallery that was announced this morning:

Anthony and Ken discuss the Visual Studio Gallery

Visual Studio Gallery

aaronmar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:42:29 GMT

Soma has just announced, the new Visual Studio Gallery. The gallery is the central location where you can find (and advertise) Visual Studio extensions. All you need to add an entry on the gallery is a Windows Live ID, so if you have a free/open-source extension, don't hesitate to help end users locate it via the gallery.

Even if you don't have any products to advertise, it's still a great place to discover both free and paid extensions for Visual Studio. For example, check out the free StickyNotes tool that Pablo Galiano put together. It's a slick WPF-based tool window that allows you to annotate project & source files.

Lang .NET Talk

aaronmar — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:03:36 GMT

A few weeks ago, Carl Brochu and I had the incredible opportunity to speak at the 2008 Lang .NET Symposium that was hosted here on the main Microsoft campus (alongside some much more well-known folks in the software industry). Our talk was titled "Integrating Languages in the Visual Studio Shell" and covered the basics of adding your own custom language to Visual Studio. We also demonstrated the array of possibilities around creating a custom-branded IDE with the Visual Studio Shell.

If you're considering adding a language to VS (or just want to know what's involved), this talk would be a great place to start.

The recordings of the talks are now available for your viewing pleasure. You will need the Silverlight 1.0 plugin in order to view them.

FREE Visual Studio 2008 for College Students via DreamSpark

aaronmar — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:46:14 GMT

A few years ago, back when I was in college, there was an academic program from Microsoft (I don't remember what it was called) where you could get Windows and the Academic version of Visual Studio by going to the CS department office, checking out some CD's, and hoping that you didn't need to reinstall after you had to return them.

This morning, Microsoft is announcing a new program called DreamSpark that allows students in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium to get Visual Studio Professional, Expression Studio, XNA Game Studio, Windows Server, and more....all for free! You just need to authenticate that you are indeed a student, and you will receive download access to these products.

This would probably be a good time to remind folks that the Visual Studio SDK and Visual Studio Shell Redistributable (which allow you to add custom extensions, languages, etc. to Visual Studio or "roll your own" custom IDE) are also free for everyone.

So, let's do the math. If you're a typical university student (who is most likely somewhere between broke and slightly over broke) .....

Visual Studio 2008 Pro	$0.00
Visual Studio 2008 SDK	$0.00
Visual Studio 2008 Shell Redist	$0.00
GRAND TOTAL	$0.00

IronPython Studio

aaronmar — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:00:10 GMT

Ever since we first released the IronPythonIntegration sample in the Visual Studio SDK, one of the constant requests we receive is along the lines of "where can I download and install it without having to build it?".

IronPython Studio is the IronPythonIntegration sample running in an instance of the Visual Studio Shell. Very cool!

Check it out if you want to run IronPython in an IDE with debugger, colorization, console window, etc...

...and you don't need to buy Visual Studio Standard/Pro/etc to run it

...and it's free