Our good friend Pablo Galiano has just released StickyNotes Professional Edition for Visual Studio over the holidays. You may think that the Professional Edition is just an improved version of the the previous free CTP edition , but it is actually totally different and improved. The original version...

We know deploying your VS package can be a pain and there are often a lot of pain with getting a PLK. Now getting a PLK is a lot easier with the page we have launched here .

I was just going around and talking about the VS Gallery on our European Tour, and on last Friday, we have added several new features. Since Anthony did such a great job in summarizing the new features, let me quote him here: --- Start of Quote --- Today we release a new set of needed features that will...

Earlier today, we shipped the matching VS 2008 SDK for VS 2008 Sp1 Beta . We are calling this VS 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta, and it is available for download immediately here . Today, Jean-Marc and I are also kicking off the VSX European Tour in Brussels, Belgium! Over the next 3 weeks, we will be traveling...

Today, we release the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta. This service pack is particularly important for Visual Studio extenders because they can test it and report any compatibility problems with their extensions. You can find the downloads are at the following locations: The download pages: ·...

I just finished with my Chalk Talk session , and the launch event is winding down. Folks are heading over to the Launch party at 7 pm, but I will be flying home tonight. My session went well. Typically, chalk talks don't get much attendance, and I was expecting 20-30 people. But in this case, every single...

I am in L.A. today and tomorrow, to attend and speak at the Visual Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 launch event. I feel very lucky to be able to participate in this historical event. This launch wave is the largest one ever for any developer / IT Pro based products. If you are not in L.A....

Since I made the last blog post on upgrading , I have received some good feedback that it was useful for basic scenarios. Unfortunately, there are some scenarios that sometimes the steps that I presented didn't work because of hard dependency on Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.dll. In this blog post...

I got pinged by Keyvan today. He and I have never met before, but he told me that he is in the process of writing a book on VSX, and would like our team to review it. My response is: OF COURSE! It's awesome to see that there are developers in the VSX Community who are doing that. In case you are interested...

Today, I heard several developers in the community experiecncing some trouble upgrading the VS 2005 package projects to VS 2008. So I took a look at what's going on and decided to blog about it here. Note that I am blogging about all the things that you need to do to migrate a very basic package project...

With the most recent release of the VS 2008 SDK, HelpStudio Lite is no longer included in the SDK download. But it is still the tool we encourage you to use for help documentation authoring and you can easily download it directly from Innovasys. I was doing a search on the download link just to see...

We are finally here! Following right on the heels of the VS 2008 release announcement yesterday, we are now announcing the availability of the VS 2008 SDK 1.0 release and the VS Shell (integrated mode) and the VS Shell (isolated mode) runtimes. It's really great to get these releases out the door...

We know that it is a little difficult to use the VS 2008 SDK Aug. CTP to create your first environment based on the Shell. We are working to improve the development experience right now before we ship the final product before the end of this year. Right now, you can refer to this magazine article that...

I can't believe it's almost October, and our team is working on so many things right now. First, we are trying to wrap up the platform components that we own in the VS 2008 product, including the VS Shell redistributable pack pieces. It's actually a very exciting time for the Division right now as...

In case you didn't see our announcement on the team blog , we have just posted the VB Pack for VS 2005 SDK 4.0 last Friday. With this add-on to the VS 2005 SDK, you will now be able to develop your own VS Packages in Visual Basic. We have also converted almost all the managed samples in the VS SDK to...

Our team just released the VS 2008 SDK August CTP late yesterday. This is very similar to the July CTP that we posted a week ago, but with some very small, targeted bug fixes that address two of the three key issues I brought up in my previous post in regards to VS Shell development. Specifically, ...

Following up on my last post about VS Shell workarounds with the current VS SDK, I wanted to make a post about the customizations that you can do with the VS Shell. Most of these are done through the <projectname>.pkdef file that gets generated when you create a new VS Shell project. The primary...

Since we shipped the VS SDK July CTP a couple of days ago, we have discovered a couple of issues that makes building your own VS Shell not as easy as we had hoped. I wanted to document all these issues and the workarounds here to unblock anyone who is trying to build a Shell. Issues 1. VS Shell template...

Yesterday, we released the VS 2008 SDK that targets the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio. You can read all the details on our team blog . One of the most exciting things about this release is the ability for customers to build the VS Shell (isolated mode). Unfortunately, there is a last minute bug that...

I can't believe it's been over a month since my last blog entry. Things have been pretty crazy here. Our team merged with a bunch of great folks over the UK, including Stuart Kent , Gareth Jones and Steve Cook who work on the DSL Tools. Now they are formally known as the Ecosystem Cambridge team. We...

Our good PM, Ken Levy, has just posted several video interviews taken right on the TechEd show floor. The VS 2008 Shell is really getting a lot of buzz and they seem to have been inundated with questions about it. I am really excited about this new offering as well, and we are working hard to get it...

Several things happened over the last couple of days. Last Friday, we released VS Orcas SDK June CTP . This is our second CTP release that targets the VS Orcas SDK Beta 1 release. Then, yesterday TechEd 2007 kicked off at Orlando. Several of my teammates ( Aaron Marten , Douglas Hodges, Ken Levy , Anthony...

Our team is happy to bring you the latest VS SDK that matches Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 that was released last week. You can download it immediately from http://www.vsipmembers.com . What We Have Done · All samples have now been updated to work with "Orcas" Beta 1, and have been converted (where...

With the recent release of the VS SDK 4.0, we have partnered with Koders.com to index all the code in the VS SDK and makes it easily searchable. This will make life easier for our developers because now you can easily find sample code that uses the particular API that you are interested in. Let's...

Right on the heels of last week's VS 2005 SDK 4.0 RTM release, our team is bringing you the first preview release of the Orcas SDK! It is available for immediate download here (login required). A few important notes about this release of the SDK: This version of the SDK must be used with the...