http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/e9f40a57-3c9a-4d61-b3ec-1640c59549b3 Last week Microsoft released an new tool for building Visual Studio Packages for new toolwindows and commands in the Visual Studio IDE.  This is a new approach...

In VS 2008 we released the Visual Studio PowerCommands.  These were a set of free extensions for Visual Studio you could download that gave you more control over the IDE and helped simplify some common tasks.  Back by popular demand we’ve updated...

Nathan is a Program Manager who works with me on the Visual Studio platform team. He is responsible for Visual Studio Shell and many other great features in Visual Studio 2010. He just published a CodeCast video. Check it out here: CodeCast Episode 79...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. Visual Studio 2010 New Features, Extensibility Points and Partner Opportunities Visual...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Last week we closed on almost all of the VSX sessions that we are planning to present at the VSX Conference in September.  We have over 20 different hour long sessions to present.  The sessions will cover everything from introductory content...

Hello everyone. Code Magazine just posted a useful article summing up how to take advantage of the Visual Studio Gallery and also does a tour of some of their favorite extensions to Visual Studio. Check it out here: http://www.code-magazine.com/Article...

Hello all.  I wanted to share with everyone some info about the upcoming VSX Developer Conference the Visual Studio Ecosystem team and the VSIP team is hosting in September. This event is being hosted on Microsoft Campus in Redmond at the Microsoft...

Today we released a significant update to the Visual Studio Gallery ( visualstudiogallery.com ) adding some much needed community features. The latest set of features will help visitors keep up to date on the latest additions to the Visual Studio Gallery...

In November 2006 Microsoft released a CTP version of the VS 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WPF & WCF). We released this CTP as a stop gap to provide developers the needed (albeit very limited) set tools to start developing for the .NET Framework...

One of the biggest areas the Visual Studio Ecosystem team receives feedback on is around difficulties with acquiring and installing Package Load Keys (PLK) which are needed for deploying your Visual Studio Package to a machine that doesn't have the Visual...

Over the last few months the Visual Studio Gallery has been growing as the one stop shop for Visual Studio Extensions. We launched the Visual Studio Gallery with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and in just three months we’ve gathered 600 extensions...

We setup a set of templates to help authors on the VS Gallery to create compelling entry pages more quickly.  Here are some steps on how to use these templates.   1.      Click on a template you wish to use: http://visualstudiogallery...