Pedro Silva's Blog : News

Visual Studio 2010 SDK for Beta 2 Now Available!

PedroSilva — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:36:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 SDK is now available for everyone to use from the Download Center. So, install it (it's quick), and start building you very own extensions to Visual Studio today! And once you have those extensions ready to share with world, post them up on the Visual Studio Gallery.

In addition to shipping the VS SDK Beta 2 on the same day as the product, we have also released the Beta 2 Integrated and Isolated shell redists, and the DSL team have shipped the Beta 2 DSL tools as well.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Available

PedroSilva — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:40:00 GMT

We announced today the availability of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 on MSDN. Later this week, on Wednesday, it will generally be available for everyone from the Download Center. There has been a ton of work, performance improvements, and bug fixing done for Beta 2, so definitely check it out and provide us feedback on what you like and don't like.

And, along with MSDN, the Visual Studio Gallery has gone through a redesign. Also, VSIX extensions available on the Gallery are now on for Beta 2.

New for the extension manager in Beta 2, we went through a UI redesign to make it appear more like the new Visual Studio shell and consistent with the New Project dialog; updated the vsixmanifest format; added support for Toolbox controls and VS Start Pages to VSIX; and fixed a slew of bugs.

The DSL Beta1 SDK is out!

PedroSilva — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:24:00 GMT

Well lots of announcements this week with the VS Beta coming out... so here's one more:

The Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK Beta1 is available for download! This one is near and dear to me because I've worked on DSL Tools in the past, and it's wonderful to see another toolkit out for Beta1.

So, if you're a veteran of Doman Specific Languages development or interested in learning to build cool graphical designers for Visual Studio, you should download and try this new release. For more information about the specifics of this release, check out Jean-Marc's blog.

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 Available!

PedroSilva — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:59:00 GMT

It pays to be in early in the morning... sometimes you get to be the first to announce. :)

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 is now available for download on MSDN Download Center. This SDK matches the Visual Studio 2010 Beta, that was released earlier this week. It provides the tools and templates needed to build new extensions for the Beta. You can still create packages, menu items, and tool windows, but now these get registered through .pkgdef files, and your extension gets packaged up into a .vsix file which you can upload and host on the Visual Studio Gallery (so that users can find them through Visual Studio in the Extension Manager). There are also new templates for writing extensions to the brand new code editor in Visual Studio.

So, give the SDK a try, and see what kind of cool extensions you can create for VS.

Want to see a full list of what's new in the SDK, look here.

Visual Studio 10 Beta1 Available!

PedroSilva — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:20:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 10 Beta1 is generally available today from MSDN's Download Center... get it while it's hot! You can either download the Pro or TeamSystem editions.

And, in this Beta1, we're showing off some new features for the VS extender community -- namely, the Extension Manager. This feature integrates with a web service on the Visual Studio gallery to highlight extensions that can be installed in Visual Studio. Also, the New Project dialog integrates with this new feature to show you templates that are available online through Extension Manager (download and create new project from the template in just one click). For Beta 1, the extensions supported are Project/Item Templates, Packages, and Editor Extensions that are uploaded to the Gallery in our new VSIX packaging format.

Check out JasonZ's blog for screenshots of these two items.

We also have the Visual Studio SDK Beta 1 in the pipeline (and should be posted real soon now) to let you start playing and extending the Beta.

Windows 7 RC is out

PedroSilva — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:18:00 GMT

The Windows 7 Release Candidate just came out yesterday. I've been using builds of Win7 on my laptop since the Beta and have been very happy with how it works... Can't wait to get the RC installed on my laptop, will try to do it early next week.

Low Bandwidth MSDN Pages

PedroSilva — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:54:00 GMT

I just read over on Scott Hanselman's blog that there's a new low bandwidth view of MSDN pages. This is definitely cool and a much quicker way to load help content from MSDN. Check out this topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlnode(loband).aspx.

It works only for library content, but that's the most important one to start with since it where most of my doc searches are looking anyway. Another cool thing is in the top right hand banner of the page, you can "persist low bandwidth view". This link makes all of your jumps into the MSDN library now use the low bandwidth pages rather than the normal MSDN pages. :)

From Scott's blog, it sounds like sometime later this year this new low bandwidth view will become the default MSDN view.

Introducing VS Extension Manager

PedroSilva — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:26:00 GMT

In case you missed it, Jason Zander posted a while back about the Visual Studio 2010 new look. In that post, were the first looks at the Visual Studio Extension Manager. This is a user experience that lets you find extensions to Visual Studio that have been posted on the VS Gallery. My team has been working hard over the last several months on this new feature for Visual Studio.

In VS2010 we wanted to make it easier for user to find all of those extensions out there that our ecosystem partners have created. There already exists a rich ecosystem of Visual Studio extensions out there for previous versions. The first version of the VS Gallery was an attempt to gather and present our partners' work. The Extension Manager brings that extension discovery functionality into Visual Studio. I think this will be a very exciting opportunity for the VSX community to get their work highlighted in Visual Studio.

First, the Extension Manager will help you browse and find new extensions that live on the VS Gallery. Then, you'll be able to download and install them directly. Finally, once they're on your machine, you will be able to enable/disable the extensions and even uninstall them.

This was just meant as a taste for what we've been working on. As Beta1 of Visual Studio 2010 rolls out, you can expect to hear more and more about the Extension Manager. And, I'll be posting more about some of the technical aspects of the Exension Manager UI and the underlying changes and technologies that we used to create it.

DSL Tools Forum Moved

PedroSilva — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:05:00 GMT

In case you're looking for the DSL Tools forum and can't find it at its last location, it has moved into the VSX (stands for Visual Studio Extensibility :) forum, so you can ask your DSL-related questions there. And, here's the new link: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=57&SiteID=1.

SkyDrive Beta Today

PedroSilva — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:27:00 GMT

The latest Windows Live service just went into Beta this morning - SkyDrive. SkyDrive is a hard drive in the cloud that lets you save personal files out on the web. Along with private folders that only you can access, it also lets you create shared folders that can be viewed by other registered users or completely public for everyone to see. This will be a really cool service for backing up some data files that you need to share across machines. And, it could definitely be the basis for some interesting content sharing applications between a web of friends. It will be interesting to see this Beta and the tools that come out around it.

Developer.com .NET Tool of the Year

PedroSilva — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 03:29:00 GMT

I just read an article on Developer.com that Visual Studio 2005 was named the .NET Tool of the Year. Having spent 3+ years working on the designers for VS 2005, it's nice to see that people have taken such a liking to the overall product.

BillG, That's The End Calling...

PedroSilva — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:34:00 GMT

I've been patiently watching and listening to a campaign run by a local radio station (107.7 The End) to get Bill Gates on their show for an interview and their music challenge (where they face-off two local celebrities to pick their best song to play and then voted on by listeners). They started off with pleas on the radio, then a website (http://www.getbillgates.com), and even tried to contact him in person and through the Microsoft PR folks. But, no luck yet. I listen to the radio show every morning on my way in to work, and I've been hoping that they would get their interview because I think it would be really fun. So, here's my attempt to get them some more visibility...

Their "Thursday Music Challenge" is good, clean fun. Usually two contestants face off with their song choices. Typically, they've done this with local celebrities, like weathermen, the guy from the gardening show, news folk, etc. The contestant gets to pick the best song they can (any genre, any time). They play the songs. Listeners call in and vote for the song they like the best.

107.7 The End is a moderately recognizable radio station outside of the western Washington area because they started around 1992 and were involved in "discovering" many of the local grunge bands of the early 90s. And, for breaking some of the newer Seattle bands, like: Death Cab for Cutie, Aqueduct, Vendetta Red, etc. And, they were the radio station that all of the people work at on MTVs Real World Seattle.

So, Bill, if you read this blog (yeah, right?), could you go on the show, give an interview, and play their music challenge? It will be fun and a good way to get some local PR.

Or, if any other Microsoft bloggers or readers have any sway with Bill or our PR group (I talking about you Scoble), could you help out?

Finally, those of you outside of the Seattle area can listen too because The End stream their broadcast live online (I think you need to sign up for a free user account though).

RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38 Released

PedroSilva — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 02:22:00 GMT

I'm back from a Thanksgiving vacation, where I didn't rest enough and ate too much. Oh well, what do you expect from Thanksgiving...

Dare has just released a new version of RSS Bandit. For those of you who haven't tried RSS Bandit, it's an open source, free RSS reader written on the .NET Framework. It has a three-pane UI similar to Outlook. And, a big new feature is NNTP support (in addition to RSS and ATOM). Now, you can get notification of new posts to your favorite newsgroups, and also post and respond to newsgroup posts from within RSS Bandit... cool.

I've been using it for a couple of years and just installed the latest drop -- it works really well.

TechEd 2005 - Day 0

PedroSilva — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 21:02:00 GMT

Sunday was my travel day. I left Seattle at 7:30 am on my way to Atlanta and then on to Orlando. The layover was exciting because I only had about 45 minutes between flights. It was made even more exciting because we landed 30 minutes late. After a nice job through the Atlanta airport, I did make it to my connecting flight, but mainly because that flight left about 10 minutes late. That was close because I'm not sure when the next possible flight to Orlando with available seats would have been. But, no harm, no foul -- I made it here.

We got in, checked into the hotel, and registered for the conference. Registration was quick and easy, no lines at 8 pm... We got our conference bags with some goodies: magazines, flyers for winning cool stuff at the exhibit hall, and product CDs including the VS 2005 Beta 2 CDs.

I spent some time looking over the session list to see which ones I can attend around my working hours at the Architect cabana. But, day 1 is going to be mostly at the cabana. I'll be there from 1 pm to 6 pm, so if you have questions on the Whitehorse designers stop by.

Free Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 CDs

PedroSilva — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 02:30:00 GMT

It appears that you can request CDs/DVDs of the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 from MSDN [via CoolThingoftheDay], even if you're not an MSDN Universal subscriber. The CDs are free and the so is the shipping (in the US or Canada) -- cool. This is a great way for non-MSDN subscribers to get Beta 2! But, it is only while supplies last.

Note: It does require registering at the site, but that seems like a fair price... :)