Starting with Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft has moved to providing updates to Visual Studio on a regular cadence of shorter intervals. The second such update, Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 , is now available. In addition to bug fixes, Update 2 contains new features in four areas: agile planning, quality...

Backward compatibility of projects and solutions has always been a tricky issue for developers. Previously, if you built a solution in Visual Studio 2008 and opened it in Visual Studio 2010, you were presented with the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard. After running the Wizard, you could open your project...

Damian Edwards of the ASP.NET product team joins us this week and shows off the JScript Editor Extensions . These four extensions add support for brace matching, the <para> tag, outlining, and highlighting instances of a word. Damian will demonstrate how these enable you to more quickly and easily...

This week we look at LightSwitch, which launched on July 26 and is now available for purchase. Of course, if you are an MSDN Subscriber you get it as part of your subscription. LightSwitch is the fastest way to build database applications for the desktop and the cloud. In this episode, you will see how...

Mei Liang is our guest this week. She is here to talk about the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, a code sample library provided by the Microsoft Community team. The Microsoft Community team monitors the MSDN forums, as well as other developer hangouts, and then creates code samples that address the...

This week we look at using the PerfWatson extension to log and report when the Visual Studio UI thread has become unresponsive. We are joined by Cameron McColl, who explains what PerfWatson is, why it was invented and what it does. Basically, PerfWatson monitors the VS UI thread and any time it is unresponsive...

This week, we look at code snippets. This is one of my favorite features in Visual Studio. Whenever I give talks, I always use code snippets. Some people copy code from Notepad. Some people drag code from the Toolbox. Not me. I create snippets. I store all the snippets for each talk in their own folder...

Perfect timing. While everyone is blogging and tweeting about Steven Sinofsky showing Windows 8 at D9, I post episode 3 of Visual Studio Toolbox. :) In this episode of Visual Studio Toolbox, we talk about reuse, something we want as much of as we can get. We look at how you can create your own item...

  Today, the debut episode of the Visual Studio Toolbox appeared on Channel 9. This is a weekly show hosted by myself. It focuses on tooling both inside and outside of Visual Studio. By inside, I mean things that ship in the box. By outside, I mean extensions you can download or build yourself....