From time to time, we see questions around building a project created with the Visual Studio 2010 SDK on a build server (e.g. Team Foundation Build , TeamCity , CC.NET , etc…). The primary misconception that folks have is that you must install Visual Studio 2010 + SDK on the build server. In...

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.

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...

One of the things you may notice is missing from the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK (compared to 2008) are the user interface guidelines. You can now find the Visual Studio 2010 User Interface Guidelines at the following location: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/VS2010UX

***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.

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...

Recently, a question was asked on the VSX Forum about bad behavior from a language service after the user issues a “split window” or “new window” command. (Fonts are wrong, scroll bars don’t work and are corrupt, etc…) The problem is even present in the RegExLanguageService...

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

Earlier this week, we released the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 . This is the SDK which is compatible with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. The blog post linked above has more details on new features and fixes in this release.

We shipped Visual Studio 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1 to the web this morning! Soma has more details. We are currently putting the finishing touches on the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 (which targets SP1) and plan on releasing it soon.

In just a few weeks, we’ll be hosting a conference here in Redmond at the Microsoft Conference Center devoted to covering Visual Studio Extensibility. I’ll be presenting a session entitled “Deploying VSX Projects”. One of the best parts about the conference is that the fee is...

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…

Anand has just announced a new tool called Namespace# for diagnosing problems and working with Help 2.0 integration. I haven't tried it out yet, but this looks like a really promising tool for anyone integrating help content with Visual Studio.

Congratulations to the MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) team who just released their first CTP! As Gareth mentioned earlier, "this is something to keep an eye on as it will play a role in Visual Studio eXtensibility in the future." Krzysztof Cwalina posted a great intro to MEF a few weeks...

A while back, there was some interest on the VSX forum around adding back functionality to have "Match Case" and "Match Whole Word" buttons on the toolbar in Visual Studio 2005. At the time, I created a little addin to do this and just posted it to a website I had access to. In the meantime, I accidentally...

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...

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...

Ever since Mattox Beckman introduced the OCaml language to those of us lucky enough to be in his "Languages and Compilers" course back at UIUC , I've had an interest in functional languages. A few months ago, Soma announced that Microsoft will be turning F# (a variant of OCaml that runs on .NET) into...

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...

A few years ago, back when I was in college , there was an academic program from Microsoft (called 'MSDN Academic Alliance') 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...

In case any of you passionate VSX developers out there also happen to be on Facebook , you might want to check out the VSX Group . It doesn't seem to be being used for much at the moment, but it is another way you can connect with other folks also extending Visual Studio.

If you open and build one of the samples in the Visual Studio 2008 SDK, and see the following error, DON'T PANIC (and don't forget your towel). Failed to retrieve paths under VSTemplate for the specified registry hive. This is a build error you will see if the Experimental hive has not been set up for...

Sorry for the late notice, but I just saw a note from Gareth that he will be doing a webcast on Domain Specific Development with DSL Tools tomorrow, Tuesday, January 29 at 9:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time). Gareth's a great presenter....if you're at all curious about DSL Tools, this will be worth your...