I'm excited to announce the availability of the Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1!

 

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 provides the tools and templates necessary to build your own extensions to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.  The SDK will allow you to create extensions using C#, Visual Basic, or C++ and provides the tools to package up your extension to share on the Visual Studio Gallery.

Once you share your extension, anyone with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 will be able to see it and download it through our newest feature, the Extension Manager.

 

 

What’s in the Beta 1 SDK?

 

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK contains several new features to help you develop Visual Studio Extensions.  The new features include:

  • The Visual Studio Integration Package Template to create WPF Tool Windows and menu commands
  • A new set of Editor extension templates to build extension to the Visual Studio 2010 Editor
  • New build tasks to create a VSIX Manifest and a VSIX container.  You can upload your VSIX container to the Visual Studio Gallery and share your extension with the world
  • A new VSIX manifest editor is available for editing your extension manifest.
  • An empty VSIX project is available for building just a VSIX container.  This is useful if you're packaging projects or templates that have already been built but need to be packaged up as a VSIX.

 

What's Changed?

 

  • The DSL design time tools have moved outside of the SDK.  A shortcut to download the DSL tools is available on the Start Menu.
  • The SDK samples are now online only on the Visual Studio Code Gallery.  A short cut to the gallery is available on the Start Menu.
  • The SDK documentation is now online only.  A short cut to the documentation is available on the Start Menu.

 

What’s after Beta 1?

 

There’s still work to be done.  We are always striving to improve the Visual Studio extension building experience and will be working on the following:

  • Improve the VSIX editing experience
  • Add additional project templates for building extensions
  • Create additional tools to help in building and debugging extensions
  • Continue to build additional samples targeting Visual Studio 2010