It's always nice to see a blog post from your VP discussing your feature area :) Soma posted a high level overview about building extensions and referenced my blog post on our team blog . Check out those posts and try out the walkthrough if you...

Our annual VSX Conference started today, the same day we officially announced and launched Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. For those who have an MSDN subscription, you can download VS 2010 Beta 2 right now. If you don't have a subscription, the Microsoft...

I just put together a quick intro to the extension manager. Consider it my 1 minute elevator pitch of what the extension manager is and what you can do with it. Check it out on Channel 9 at: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/cgranger/The-VS2010-Extension...

Our Visual Studio Gallery just got an update today with some small changes since our initial Beta 1 release a few weeks ago. Steven Wilssens, our main PM working on the gallery sums up the changes below: Feature Highlights · Referrals Count – During our...

Several partners have asked me how they can package up their Visual Studio 2010 Toolbox Controls as a VSIX and deploy it on the Visual Studio Gallery. In the past, we had a Toolbox Control Installer (TCI) which shipped as an MSM in the Visual Studio SDK...

I just got forwarded this Channel 9 video posted a couple of weeks ago: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-on-C9-VS-2010-Beta-1-Windows-API-Code-Pack--a-WPF-Jukebox/ Dan and Brian talk about several new VS 2010 Beta...

Our Visual Studio Chief Architect, Rico Mariani, wrote up a great blog about why we haven't moved to a 64 bit version of Visual Studio. I've been asked this several times from partners and customers and I've gotten different responses asking the same...

It's always great to see your General Manager excited about a feature you worked on. It's nice to see him mention it in his blog. It's even better when he sits down and writes an entire blog post about your feature! I demo'ed the Extension Manager...

I updated our Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK readme a few days ago but I wanted to call this out in case someone else ran into this and needed a workaround. Problem: When I try installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK, it crashes when I click Next...

We quietly shipped the Visual Studio Integrated and Isolated Shells when Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 was released. The shells are still work in progress as we made some changes since VS 2008 SP1. Both shells will have all the new goodness that came with...

The VSIX file is the unit of deployment for a Visual Studio 2010 Extension. Visual Studio will recognize the VSIX extension and install the contents of the file to the right location. A VSIX file is a zip file that uses the Open Packaging Convention...

One of our Visual Studio Extensibility MVPs just put together a great blog about why you should learn about VS 2010 Extensibility. Check out Istvan Novak's blog at: Five Reasons to Learn VS 2010 Extensibility As a side note, there have been a...

If you have any Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 extensibility questions with the Extension Manager, VSIX, pkgdef files, moving extensions to VS 2010, SDK, or anything related to extending Visual Studio, you can post your questions at our Beta 1 Extensibility...

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Reference Assistant extension for Visual Studio in my blog . I've been working closely with Darren Stokes to produce a Visual Studio 2010 version. Darren was quickly able to put together a VS 2010 version of his product...

One of our Editor Developers (Noah Richards) has uploaded the first and second Visual Studio extension on the new Visual Studio Gallery . The two extensions are a Wiki Classifier that shows .mwiki files in a nice easily readable format inside the VS...

It looks like the guys over in Jetbrains are starting to work on their Visual Studio 2010 Resharper extension! http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2009/05/preview-of-resharper-for-visual-studio-2010-coming-soon/ As a huge fan of Resharper, I can't...

We're live!!! After nearly a year and a half, we've reached another milestone for Visual Studio. The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 bits shipped to MSDN this morning. It'll be more broadly available in a few days once the servers are sync'd up but if you...

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 Supplemental Readme The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Documentation is available here . The DSL Tools for Beta 1 is available here . This posting contains additional readme and known issues about the Visual Studio...

Tech Ed is around the corner! I can't believe it's been almost a year since the last Tech Ed in Orlando. I wish I could be there this year in L.A. but unfortunately, we weren't able to get some of the extensibility topics on the session list. However...

A few weeks ago, several of our VSIP partners came on campus for another Dev Clinic. One of the advantages of being in the VSIP program is one on one discussions with the product team for questions about building your Visual Studio Extensions. I had...

I've been asked this several times by our Visual Studio Integration Partners, by folks with questions on the forums, and even from internal Microsoft teams who want to use the Isolated Shell. The problem is there are so many places that you can customize...

This has been driving me crazy for a couple of weeks now so I wanted to blog the solution and hopefully help someone else that runs into this. A couple of weeks ago, I rebooted my machine, logged in and launched MS Outlook. From that point on, every...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Atleast it is in the Northwest. There's about a foot of snow outside my house and Microsoft Campus has been semi opened the last few days because of our winter storm. Having grown up in Winnipeg, Manitoba,...

I normally don't make a big deal out of localized languages shipping but this one's special. We've been working on it for a long time (since I was still on the VS Setup team) so it's great to see this come to life and finally be released to customers...

The build process in the developer division builds symbols for all our binaries on a daily basis. Once we ship, we have a process that publishes those symbols to the online Microsoft Symbol Server to enable developers to debug into parts of Visual Studio...