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Pedro Silva's Blog

Development lead on Visual Studio Platform team focusing on the extensibility of Visual Studio.

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My name is Pedro Silva. I’m the development lead in the Visual Studio Platform team at Microsoft, working on VS Extensibility features, enabling VS extensions and the VS SDK.

The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

Look Ma, No More PLKs!

For those of you trying out Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you may have already noticed... But, Visual Studio 2010 no longer requires you to create Package Load Keys (PLKs) for writing and deploying VSPackage extensions to VS. This will probably come with some fanfare by those of you who've had trouble with PLKs, or getting your packages to load because of them, or never understood why they were needed anyway.

The requirement for Shell Load Keys (SLKs) has also been removed, so you can create new isolated shells without them.

For those of you who have no idea what PLKs/SLKs are, then no need to worry... :)

Published Friday, June 19, 2009 1:35 PM by PedroSilva

Comments

# re: Look Ma, No More PLKs! @ Friday, June 19, 2009 5:09 PM

Does this mean we don't have to deal with the experimental hive anymore?

kfarmer

# re: Look Ma, No More PLKs! @ Friday, June 19, 2009 5:52 PM

There isn’t an experimental hive as you knew it in VS2008. There is still an experimental instance of VS 2010, where you can develop and debug extensions for VS without impacting your default installation, but it’s a much lighter weight thing. It’s more of a folder redirect for where we load extensions from when you run VS with the /rootSuffix set.

But, a full description of the experimental instance is probably worth a full blog post of its own...

PedroSilva

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