There is plenty of new functionality in VS 2010 but not nearly as much information on extending it. Karl Shifflett published a two part series on creating design times for Silverlight & WPF controls in 2010. Take a look: http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/extensibility-series-wpf-silverlight-design-time-code-sharing-part-i/
I just heard that folks that build the NDepends Static Analysis tools are working on their Visual Studio 2010 version. They tell me they will have it ready by the time we ship Visual Studio which will be a great complement. For my first time looking at this tool I thought the Code Query Language (CQL) was a great way to enforce basic validation on your code before it’s approved for checkin. I could see this integrating nicely with the VS TFS source control service to automate many repeatable code review tasks.
Take a look at the product here: http://www.ndepend.com/
I noticed an update to an extension on the Visual Studio Gallery last week. Tab Studio extends the tab well region of Visual Studio to give you an alternate view of the documents you have open. I haven’t tried it personally yet but I’ve seen lots of community members give suggestions on how VS might organize their tabs differently than we do out of the box today. This extension should hopefully help some of those folks out.
Found a parody on YouTube that’s pretty entertaining. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysQ43s9U4Y
I’ve heard a lot of buzz from customers looking to get a hold of a version of Resharper that works with VS 2010 Beta 1. Well the folks over at Jetbrains have started releasing a preview of their VS 2010 version here: http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+for+Visual+Studio+2010+(Preview).
Terry just posted two great blogs talking about how you can extend features in Visual Studio 2010 Professional and how you can extend Visual Studio 2010 Team System.
Reference assistant helps you visualize the dependencies in your .NET application to help speed up development, improve your deployments, and debug sticky dependency bugs.
Some of the interesting features I read about were their Visualizer for IoC / DI configuration files, ability to identify missing assembly references, and configuration file type resolution.
You can check out their extension here:http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/BA1FF7E5-1C24-4386-AD40-1C1C83BC59F0.
You can use text templates to author your own code generators with intellisense & syntax-highlighting in Visual Studio. This naturally has powerful applications for tool vendors looking to output code from non-textual representations of a domain such as diagrams, xml or other data sources.
Tangible has created a T4 editor to help you create T4 Text Templates. The Tangible T4 Editor provides statement completion & intelisense for the T4 code sections. Their editor also integrates with the error list to report errors on mal-formatted T4 code blocks. A rich template gallery allows you to browse many existing templates.
The Tangible T4 Editor is up on the Visual Studio Gallery here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/050a2994-cd28-4d1f-a185-9814e3389f4c.
Extensibility is one of the big initiatives on my team for Visual Studio 2010. We are eager to see all the interesting and innovative concepts that people come up with to extend Visual Studio 2010 and make their lives more productive. Big or small I’d love to hear about them so if you have an extension for Visual Studio 2010 please comment, email, our shout.
Last week we launched the newest update to the Visual Studio Gallery, the one stop shop for finding Products & extensions for Visual Studio. With this release we’ve added enhancements that make finding & sharing extensions on the Visual Studio Gallery even easier. We’ve also added features that will light up Visual Studio 2010 with content from the Gallery. All of this is built on the MSDN platform so we can continue to bring valuable content and information together and surface it up to Visual Studio users in the right place.
With this release of the Visual Studio Gallery we focused on navigating the growing number of products that extend Visual Studio, lighting up Visual Studio 2010 with content from the Gallery, and hosting extensions to deliver a great experience.
Navigating the growing number of Visual Studio products and extensions. The Visual Studio Gallery has grown to over 1000 extensions in just a year’s time. The new Visual Studio Gallery lets users navigate departments of popular extensions including Tools, Controls, & Templates. As the ecosystem of extensions continues to grow we’ll add new departments to the site. The new VSIX technology for deploying Visual Studio 2010 extensions allows us to automatically extract information from the extension’s metadata making extensions easier to upload & share.
Lighting up Visual Studio 2010 with content from the Gallery. With this release of the gallery we have all the pieces in place so Visual Studio will start surfacing new content from the Gallery as soon as we ship Beta 1. The Gallery services built into Visual Studio allow us to query for specific types of extensions so now we can surface context specific extensions based on what users are doing? Now Visual Studio users can find all online project templates right from within the New Project Dialog and other teams can start using these services when they are ready to get on board.
Hosting extensions to deliver a great experience. Contributing to the Visual Studio Gallery doesn’t just mean uploading a link to the extension you host on another server anymore. Now you can upload your extensions to the Gallery and make sure they’ll always be available for Visual Studio users. If you are uploading extensions on behalf of Microsoft make sure you follow policies for publishing binaries & source code online. Uploading your extension to an existing contribution even lets you keep your existing ratings & reputation.
Other great features in the new Visual Studio Gallery.
- The integration with MSDN now gives users a chance to take advantage of a shared profile across all MSDN properties. Contributing to the gallery enhances your MSDN reputation giving high quality contributors the recognition they deserve.
- Visual Studio Gallery contributions can now enable an optional discussion board to separate reviews from comments and give contributors an opportunity to post updates, response to feedback, & discuss bugs.
- All contributions with an upload now track usage data and provide charting to give contributors a sense of which of their products are getting the most traffic on the Visual Studio Gallery.
You can start creating new contributions on the Gallery right away by downloading the SDK to build your first extension.
Being a creature that operates exclusively on habit, as is proven by a few forehead marks from poles I might walk into from time to time, I have to habitual-ize (made up word) something new like blogging for me to really get any value from it. I thought blogging on cool technologies I see from time to time might be the thing I need to trick myself into blogging.
I recently learned that when creating appointments in my Outlook calendar that I can describe the date I’m looking for and let Outlook figure out the actual date without having to Open the date time control to click on the actual date. For example:
Open Outlook
File \ New \ Appointment
Tab till you get to the Start time
Type ‘tomorrow’ & press Enter
Outlook automatically calculates tomorrow’s date and enters it in. It also calculates other date descriptions like ‘next week’, ‘next month’, ‘next year’ and even offsets such as ‘next month + 5 days’. Now that is pretty cool by itself but what I didn’t realize was this also works for other named calendar events such as:
New years, new years eve, new years day, Christmas, Valentine’s day, and I’m sure a ton of others I haven’t found yet.
Yesterday I did an internal demo of products from two of our partners, StudioWorks Component One. StudioWorks, with its products Designbox & Design Gallery, enhances the Visual Studio Windows application design experience with a library of preconfigured designs that can be applied to any .NET control. Component One delivers a rich set of .NET components for developers to beef up the UI of their application. While both of these partners make great products, what excited me the most was to see the collaboration that’s going on between these partners. Component One has released a set of designs for Studioworks’ Design Gallery product that allow you to quickly style Component One’s controls that are part of their Studio for WinForms product. It’s great to see the sustaining opportunities Visual Studio and our partners create for each other.
Morning everyone. It's been just over a month since our VSX Conference but it feels like it just finished yesterday. I truly enjoyed meeting everyone at the conference, particularly the active community members that until now I've only known through pen (or keyboard).
I realize there are many folks who couldn't make the trip out to Redmond for the event but truly would have wanted to participate. Also given just how much content we delivered in such a short time I'm sure there were more than a few folks who wished they could have seen both sessions during some of the time slots.
Well we recorded all the sessions and I've just finished uploading them to Channel9 so you can review, share & download this content for future use. All of the videos are linked off of the Session & Agenda page of the VSX Conference site: http://msdn.com/vsx/conference.
We'll likely use that link again next year so expect these pages to move to another part of the Dev Center in the coming weeks but you can be sure they'll remain accessible through the VSX Dev Center (http://msdn.com/vsx/) regardless of where they move.
Thank you everyone for the valuable content & feedback during this event and I look forward to seeing you all again next year.
We just posted the agenda & speaker biographies for the VSX Conference coming up next month from September 15 - 16th. Use the online agenda to get a sense of what the various tracks will cover and start thinking about which sessions you will want to attend.
The speaker bios should help you get to know the speakers at this conference. We have some serious brass from around the division participating in this event. This is a great opportunity to get to know industry leaders & architects shaping the Visual Studio product.
We've also updated the sessions list so you can read more about each session in the agenda as well as identify the speakers that will present each topic.
If you have any questions just send them to vsxconf@microsoft.com.
