Aaron Marten

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...

Looks like the VSX Forum has been migrated over to the new MSDN Forums!

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...

Enjoy !

FYI... Jimmy has an update on where the Lang .NET videos went. The company hosting the server reported a 5,000% increase in traffic when the videos were posted online!

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...

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...

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...

There's a nasty bug in the Visual Studio 2008 SDK browser (i.e. the app you can use to browse the samples, etc...) which can cause it to not be restored from "minimized" and/or cause big ugly red "X"s all over the place. This will be fixed in the next...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

James has a great post about updating a project that was building with the Visual Studio 2005 SDK to build in the Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

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...

The Visual Studio Ecosystem Group (includes the Visual Studio SDK + DSL Tools) is hiring! If you'd like to come help us continue to improve and refine the Visual Studio SDK and the DSL Tools, please get in touch with us . The open positions are in both...

Over on the VSX Team Blog, we've announced that the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 has shipped ! You can download the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 from the VSX Dev Center. Enjoy and please send us feedback!

We've just released Visual Studio 2008 to manufacturing and the web! MSDN subscribers can go download the bits immediately . I've already been seeing questions from folks about when a compatible version of the Visual Studio SDK will be available. The...

Earlier today, Soma (VP for Microsoft Developer Division) announced some big news for VSIP partners and folks doing VSX: Visual Studio 2008 is almost ready for release, and will RTM this month! "As a response to our partners’ request, we are going to...

I'll be presenting a session entitled "An Introduction to Visual Studio Extensibility" at the upcoming DevTeach conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada at the end of November. Also from the VSX Team, James Lau is drilling into the details of creating your...

This has already been mentioned on the VSX Team blog , but CoDe Magazine has just published a special "Focus Edition" version of the publication centered around VSX! You can read the entire magazine on their site , or download a PDF copy . Be sure not...

We've just posted the Visual Basic Pack for the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 4. This is an add-on pack which adds Visual Basic versions of most of the C# samples as well as a Visual Basic version of the Package Wizard. Also, we will be supporting Visual...