Deep's Weblog

Moving on to New Avenues!

2008-05-24T08:58:00Z

I had a fun ride on the VSX team over the last 3 years. It was great shipping VS 2005, VS 2008 and the SDKs and also working with VSIP partners, attending VSIP conferences and sharing some great ideas on improving developer productivity. I am confident that VSX is in great hands and the team will deliver enhanced support for seamless integration for partner products with VS.

It is time for me to move on to new things. I am taking on a new role in the Live Services Division working in Display Advertisement Targeting. This is a new areas for me and I am excited about the oppurtunities for Microsoft in the Live world.

Thanks everyone in the VSX community for the moments I got to share with you!

Off to Barcelona TechEd EMEA/VSIP Dev Lab!

2007-11-02T09:14:00Z

I will be attending TechEd EMEA in Barcelona and presenting at the VSIP dev lab being held on Nov 9 and Nov 10.

We have a couple of talks on customizing Visual Studio in the general sessions:
- Discussing Various Scenarios for Customizing Visual Studio - From Visual Studio Shell to Visual Studio Tools for Applications
- Build your Own IDE with the Visual Studio Shell

The VSIP dev lab will cover technical aspects of Visual Studio extensibility using MPF/VSIP APIs and also provide overview of the upcoming VS 2008 SDK V1 release.

I am looking forward to this trip. We are going to have a fun time in Barcelona. I look forward to meeting you if you are coming to TechEd Barcelona.

Thanks
Deep

Tools for Tools

2007-10-27T03:36:00Z

As we come close to shipping VS 2008 SDK V1, I would like to talk a little about the future of the VS SDK and the plans we have around supporting the extensibility community.

We have been focussing a lot on the samples and tooling to make it easier for extenders to use the VSIP APIs and consume the VS SDK but now we are going to be changing the focus to build Tools for Tools. What this means is that we want to make it create Tools that make it easy for the VSX extenders to create the developer tools for the end users.

It has been challenging for the VSX community to create extensions and deploy these extensions. It is also tricky migrating extensions from previous versions of Visual Studio to a later version. VS Shell introduces another layer of complexity in sharing extensions. We are now taking this challenge and will try to provide solutions tha will make some of these tasks easier in future.

Make it easier to create extensions
–VSX DSL for defining packages containing commands, tool windows etc.
–Generate the skeleton code from a VSX definition
–Similar to experience that DSL Tools offers for creating DSLs

Make it easier to test and debug extensions
–Generate test stubs from a VSX definition
–Specialized inspectors to view the state of extensions during debugging

Make it easier to deploy extensions
–VSX Setup DSL to define set of VSX assets to be deployed
–Experience to get a PLK from within VS
–Experience to upload/list your extension on online catalog

Make it easier to migrate extensions between versions of VS
–Exploit VSX DSL and code generation

Make it easier to customize the VS Shell
–Specialized designers for customizing the shell

Let me know what you think about these ideas and challenges that we are taking on!

Thanks
Deep

Oct 2007 VSIP Conference

2007-10-13T04:12:00Z

The next VSIP conference starts Oct 15 and runs through Oct 17. This is one of the biggest VSIP conference we have organized in the history of the VSIP program. I will be presenting on Oct 16, 2007 during the conference and my presentation will provide an overview of the V1 VS 2008 SDK and the future plans and vision. We have some great presentations during this conference and if you are there you are going to love the content. I am looking forward to the conference and meeting VSIP partners attending the conference to get some valuable feedback on the V1 SDK so that we can go back to the draweing board and plan the future releases.

We have a partner get together at the Chateau Ste Michelle winery in woodinville. I love their Syrah's. I hope you will make it to this event if you are attending the conference.

See you at the Conference!

VB Pack for VS SDK 2005

2007-09-17T01:15:00Z

The VB pack for VS SDK 2005 is now released. It provides the SDK samples converted in the Visual Basic language and a new wizard that is used for generating Visual Basic based integration Packages for Microsoft Visual Studio. This download is an add-on to VS SDK 2005 4.0.

VB support for the upcoming VS 2008 SDK will be included in the SDK and won't be a separate add-on pack.

The VB Pack for VS SDK 2005 includes Visual Basic Samples which were converted from the C# samples in the SDK. The new Visual Basic samples can be accessed from the Visual Studio SDK Browser. It also as the Visual Basic Visual Studio Integration Package Wizard that will assist in generating Visual Basic Integration Packages for Microsoft Visual Studio.

VS Shell Isolated Development

2007-09-08T03:55:00Z

We are working actively to enhance the expereince of package development for VS Shell Isolated SKU for the VS 2008 V1 VS SDK to be released to target VS 2008 RTM. This will make is easier to add new and existing VSIP packages to a VS Shell SKU. We will be adding support for creation of pkgdef files for the managed packages added to the SKU. The F-5 scenario will also be enhanced to detect the updated to the packages and automatically run the Setup for the SKU to re-create the registry hive for the SKU. We are currently investigating how to enable creation of pkgdef file for native packages. The packages will also support targeting VS Shell SKU to run integration tests added by the packages. This should help test the new packages added to the SKU and reduce the overall cost of testing the SKU.

Stay tuned for these enahncements planned for VS SDK V1 release for VS 2008!

Visual Studio Shell

2007-06-08T01:15:00Z

We announced a new product "Visual Studio Shell" that will be released with Visual Studio 2008. This SKU of Visual Studio will be available to VSIP partners when Visual Studio 2008 BETA 2 ships.

The Shell comes in 2 flavors: Integrated and Isolated:

The "Integrated" flavor is the core Visual Studio Shell with all the Microsoft provided languages removed. This was called Premier Partner Edition in VS 2005 and VS 2003. It is branded as "Microsoft Visual Studio". If you are a VSIP partner with your own language or developer tool that could run on it's own, or integrate if the user has a full edition of Visual Studio installed, this is usually the right flavor.

The "Isolated" flavor of the Visual Studio Shell allows re-branding of the shell. This enables you to brand an application built on Visual Studio Shell completely. The Visual Studio Shell "Isolated" based application live entirely independent from Microsoft Visual Studio SKUs.

VS SDK Code Name "Orcas" June CTP Released!

2007-06-08T00:58:00Z

The VS SDK team released the latest VS SDK targeting Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 last week. You can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1C99A9C8-ADFC-4DE6-8B9E-2A5C6B540332&displaylang=en.

This SDK exposes the Run As Normal User (RANU) feature for the first time. When the Visual Studio SDK is installed on a computer, a user with non-administrator permissions can now create a package by using the wizard, and then press F5 to open the new package in the experimental hive. There are a few issues in the platform that causes the devenv /setup action to fail so you might still have to be an admin on the box but the registry re-direction is implemented and the packlages registration happens under HKCU when RANU is used. These issues in the platform are being fixed for BETA 2 release.

There were also some changes to DSL Tools. These include new path editing. In DSL Tools, paths are used in a DSL definition to specify diagram element maps and explorer behavior. This CTP adds richer path editing to the DSL Designer, in the form of a drop-down tree control. You can now either type the path syntax, or you can display a tree view of all the valid paths from the current starting point.

Also, with the current release of the CTP, we have removed the Release month, for example 2007.04, from the SDK folder structure and “Microsoft” was added to the VS SDK shortcut and root folder name.

Thanks

Deep

RANU Package Development

2007-05-09T00:37:00Z

Today I want to talk about RANU for Package development. RANU stands for Run as Normal user. In Orcas VS SDK, we are providing package developers the ability to create packages as a normal user. Package developers do not need to be administrators on the development box. This was the requirement in VS 2005 SDK since the packages were registered in the experimental VS hive under HKLM.

In Orcas SDKs we will provide the ability to use HKCU as the package registrative hive for package development purposes. There is a new switch added to devnev.exe /RANU. This switch launches VS and uses the hive under HKCU. In the VS SDK, the vsregx tool will be updated to create experimental hive under HKCU. Regpkg.exe tool will be updated to register packages under HKCU. The VS SDK samples build tasks will be uodated to use the regpkg.exe that registers the package in the HKCU experimental hive.

RANU does not enable package deployment under HKCU though. You will continue to deploy VS packages under the HKLM hive of VS. For this purpose we continue to give the ability to use HKLM for package development. You would need to create the experimental hive in HKLM manually using the vsregx tool and modify the build task on the sample in SDK to register the package under HKLM.

These changes are currently not in the VS SDK BETA 1 CTP targeting Orcas. We hope to provide this functionality in the next CTP of VS SDK.

V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!

2007-03-01T23:33:00Z

On behalf of the VS Tools Ecosystem team, I am pleased to announce that after months of hard work, VS SDK 4.0 has been released! This is the last SDK release planned for Visual Studio 2005. The team has done a ton of work to make this release friendly to developers who are new to Visual Studio extensibility. It is available for immediate download on the Microsoft Download Center.

Some of the new features included in this release:

VS SDK Browser – the new entry-point to the entire SDK; includes new QuickStart Tutorials and a completely revamped sample browsing experience, community resources and tools info
Package Load Analyzer – allows you to easily diagnose package load failures
Toolbox Installer redistributable package – allows component vendors to simplify deployment, along with a sample demonstrating how to do it all.

TFS Contents – new and updated TFS samples and documentation

Sandcastle – new set of tools for generating managed class library documentation (Sandcastle)

Updated Setup experience