I just posted an article entitled “Custom Extension Types with VSIX” on the Visual Studio Blog . Check it out if you’re interested in distributing custom content (not necessarily code) as a Visual Studio extension.

In the Visual Studio 2008 SDK, we have several samples (most notably, IronPythonIntegration) set up to use the ZipProject, ZipItem, and VSTemplate build actions to create template zip files. Last week, I published a post on the Visual Studio Blog discussing how you could build templates from source files...

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...

***Disclaimer: This information is about Visual Studio 2010 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...

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.

Somasegar (VP in charge of DevDiv) has just blogged that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 has been released to the web. It will be available on MSDN in the next few hours, and available as a public download on Wednesday. (We will be releasing a matching Visual Studio SDK soon also.) Beta 1 is the first time...

Jason Zander , the General Manager for Visual Studio, has just announced some more details (with screenshots) on the new look and feel for Visual Studio 2010 (which relies heavily on WPF). In the same post, he also includes a screenshot of the new Visual Studio Extension Manager ( mentioned previously...

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...