Craig Skibo's WebLog

Usually I do not install the IntelliPoint software that is in the box when you buy a Microsoft Mouse – unless I have Visual Studio installed on the computer I am using the mouse with. Visual Studio has two buttons to the left of the Start Debugging button...

The first release of the VS Content Installer Power Toys are now available. You will need a recent build of VS (I tested with the August CTP, but the July version may also work) to use these tools. Remember, they are still a beta build, so not everything...

OK, I have been really bad in updating this blog over the past few months – the last time was mid-November. So what has been going on? Lots and lots of work. Mostly we have been preparing to ship VS by fixing bugs, smoothing out the wrinkles, making it...

So here we are the day after we try our best to gorge ourselves on turkey, stuffing, and many other foods. Hopefully everybody had a good holiday. Today is the traditional start of the shopping spree for the Christmas holiday. Me, I got my shopping done...

From talking with people, it appears that one area of confusion is over the use of the Properties object. How should you use it, how do the contents of this collection get generated, and why does it exist? To start off, there is a Properties object available...

OK, this will probably be the only political posting I make, I will keep it non-partisan, but I am not happy. In my non-work life I am quite political, but I will not mention my party affiliation because this really is not the correct forum. Because I...

I had a comment left on my last post about enterprise templates, and it is a good time to discuss a new feature in our VSTemplate Wizard – Multi-Project Templates. The most common way of using the VSTemplate Wizard is to create a single project or project...

In my last post, I said that I was hard at work on some new features that you will be able to use in Visual Studio 2005. So what do these features do? Imagine this scenario: You have created a really cool project, for example, a program for managing your...

It has been a while since I last wrote here, but the past couple months have been very busy. So, what have I been up to? After the 8+ years that I have been at Microsoft, I have never taken more that 4 days of vacation in a year. After loosing many, many...

The last few days I have been meeting with 3 rd party developers, helping them with their VSIP packages and Add-ins, giving talks, and trying to look helpful. One of the questions that we got has been a center of controversy for a while – why are...

Within the past week, services have been a big issue on two fronts. First, it was found that some services VS provides would create a new instance every time you called it. Second, in my last post I described a bug where input in one buffer would appear...

I have been quite busy lately, I have been taking on many odd jobs designing and creating smaller features that everybody else does not have time to work on, but features that people have been asking for. All of this has been distracting me from my blogging...

After a lot of time spent working on my IL editor and IL project, I finally have a workable version ready for you to try out, if you would like. The MSI file that is linked below, includes code for a project and an editor. The project has templates to...

Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 had the ability to stop a macro from running by double-clicking the small “spinning cassette” in the system tray next to the clock. For example, suppose you had a macro like this: Sub NeverEndingMacro() ...

Last weekend I started playing around with my “Device Blogger” project again – no I have not forgotten about it, just a little busy lately trying to get Beta 1 shipped. I also had a few problems with the project; there were a few bugs...

As you probably know by now from the abundant number of postings on the issue, VS 2005 beta 1 and the Express editions are now available. A few months ago, when we released the PD5 build of VS , the Add-in wizard had a listing of about 8 different applications...

When working with users who want to use the code model to parse their files, the first thing they ask for is if they can get into the method bodies to find out what is inside of them. The code model does not allow it because of the complexities of designing...

Last night I was sitting in bed watching a little TV, and using my PocketPC to browse the web through my wireless connection in my house. I was also trying to catch up on some of the blogs on MSDN , when I realized that I could easily convert VSBlogger...

It has taken me a while, but I finally uploaded the VSBlogger Add-in to a GotDotNet workspace. You can find it under the name VSBlogger. There are a couple known bugs, mainly that it saves its data files to the “C:\msblogger.dat” root directory...

8 years ago today was my first day at Microsoft. That was a busy week, which included graduation from college ( Penn State ), my birthday, flying to Seattle , trying to find an apartment and car , etc. Much has changed since then. Microsoft has grown...

If you are trying to build Add-ins with the May Tech Preview of VS 2005 (the version we handed out at TechEd), you may run into a few bugs with the code generated by the wizard. There are a few easy workarounds to these bugs to make the wizard work again...

Thursday I did my interview with MSDN TV. I am not sure when it will be posted, but I will let you know. I also wandered around the showroom floor, talking with the exhibitors in the expo hall. While I was walking past one booth (I believe it was for...

Two talks scheduled, two talks completed. We started the day with a “Cabana” session at 8:30am. I really liked this format, and we may do it more often. Ken stood in front of the group, giving demos of third party products, showing off what...

If you have written more than the basic hello world Add-in, you probably have run into problem where you wrote some bad code (hey, it happens to everyone) and the Add-in was set to load on startup. Then, when you start VS , the bad code (such as using...

After some initial technical problems, I finally got my internet connection working in my hotel room. A few things I have learned through all my travels: The internet connection almost never works For some unknown reason, my hotel is always next...