VS Project Team Blog

We aren’t going away -- we’re just moving to a better home. To give you even more news, articles, and walkthroughs on Visual Studio, the VS Project Team blog is moving to become part of The Visual Studio Blog . As part of The Visual Studio Blog , we’ll...

If you write a C# or VB.NET class library that contains ASP.NET controls that also have .js or .css files embedded in your assembly, you probably want to minify those files for optimal download size in production, but keep the files readable for coding...

If there is one thing Microsoft is really good at, it is creating really long names for things :) But the name aside, I just wanted to add my call to what is likely to be several blog posts about this upcoming event starting on October 19th. VS 2010...

Sorry for our absence in the last couple of weeks - we've had some internal deadlines to hit and so everyone on the team has been really swamped. However, things are calming down again so I hope to have some new posts up soon. Feel free to post up requests...

Update (7 June 2012): Instructions when using Visual Studio 2012 The new Visual C++ project system in Visual Studio 2010 leverages the .NET System.Diagnostics trace logging feature to help users investigate why certain operations have failed or just to...

The goal of this post is to quickly explain what VC++ Directories are, what happened to them in VS 2010 and why the change was made. Life in VS 2008 To start with, let’s take a look at the VS 2008 feature of VC++ Directories. If you were to go to the...

In my last post , I talked at length about the various types of MSBuild elements – items, properties, imports, etc. One of the things that I said I would get around to in a later post was to explain what I meant by “inherited properties”, where they came...

Bogdan Mihalcea is a developer on the VC++ build and project system team and he's been working on the new project and build system for VC++. He has some great insight to share about the architecture and the advantages that VC++ developers can leverage...

In my previous blog post on platform extensibility, I introduced you to the data-driven nature of the property pages UI. I explained how a collection of xml files drives the UI but stopped short of describing the contents of these files. I'll continue...

Have you ever wanted to write a custom tool (like a custom parser or a compiler) and add it to the VC++ project system? Until now, we had three disparate ways of doing it, viz. Build Events, Custom Build Step and Custom Build Rule. These three methods...

Changing over to MSBuild as the project file format and build engine has some subtle changes. I just want to give a quick tour of the main concepts and terms so you'll be better able to work with the system - and better able to understand the new features...

Hi! My name is Brian Tyler and I'm the technical lead for the VS Project Team here at Microsoft. Our areas of responsibility are those surrounding projects and solutions in Visual Studio - specifically the C++, C# and VB project systems - but we're involved...