Quan To's Visual Studio Extensibility blog

After countless hours, the Developer Division has just released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1!!!

Although I left the deployment team back in November, I've been working on the Service Pack as a member of the VS Ecosystem team.  We are delivering an updated Visual Studio Isolated Shell and a patch for the Visual Studio Integrated Shell.  We will also deliver an SDK targeting the Service Pack in the near future.

The main Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack will target the Visual Studio Integrated Shell.  We will also have a smaller Visual Studio Integrated Shell patch that will be available in the Visual Studio Integrated Shell SP1 redist.

The links for the Service Packs are available here:

If you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, please install the Service Pack.  It'll definately make your development experience even better!

Our Visual Studio Ecosystem team will be putting on a conference on September 15th and 16th.  It'll be a two day conference for anyone interested in learning more about extending Visual Studio.  If you're interested, the preliminary sessions have been posted at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc676517.aspx

For more info on the conference, check out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsx/cc512752.aspx

Hope to see you there.

Our VSX community PM, Ken Levy has decided to leave the castle walls at Microsoft and start his own consulting business.

I've only been on the team for half a year but during the few times I worked with Ken, I was amazed how charsimatic he was and his ability to just get up in front of a crowd of people and convince them how cool extending VS is.

Ken's Texas Hold'em skills need improving though so hopefully he'll be practicing that during his downtime :)

For those interested in following his adventures post Microsoft, Ken's new blog is at http://mashupx.com/blog.

With Ken leaving, we now have an open community program manager position available.  We also have QA positions open as well.  If you're interested in being a community PM or a software deisgn engineer in test on the Visual Studio Extensibility team, let me know! :)

Anyways, congrats Ken and best wishes on your new adventure.  Hopefully we'll see you at the VSX Conference this fall.

I've been on the Ecosystem team for just over half a year now.  I don't know how many times I've been told, "PLKs suck", "PLKs are hard", "Why do you need a PLK?".

I even had a customer come up to me at Tech Ed lecturing me how hard it is to get PLKs. :)

Anthony has been on a mission to kill PLKs but in the interim, he's helped make getting PLKs a lot easier.  Check out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsx/cc655795.aspx.

No more waiting for an email with your PLK!  It's all automated now!  woo hoo!

For Tech Ed 2008, I gave a Chalk Talk on how to build and customize your own Visual Studio Isolated Shell product.  There are several examples out there such as the World of Warcraft Add On Studio and the Iron Python Studio.

My goal for this blog post is to cover most of the topics I discussed during the chalk talk.  I will be covering how to create your own shell, customize it, and add the Storyboard Designer packages to your shell.

Prerequisites:

1.       Install Visual Studio

2.       Install the Visual Studio SDK

3.       Download the DSL package for the Storyboard Designer

Step 1 – Create your shell

This is the easiest part of the walk through.  Launch Visual Studio, select New Project, choose Other Project Types, and select Extensibility.  Choose the Visual Studio Isolated Project and enter a name for your shell.

After clicking next, a default shell project is created for you.

At any point during this walk through, press F5 to build the shell, launch the shell, and view the changes you made.  Note – once you update the pkgdef, pkgundef, or vsct file, the shell will run the /setup command when deploying to rebuild the menus, or reregister the package.  It will takes a minute or two after the compilation, depending on your machine speed and RAM.

Step 2 – Customize the UI

The pkgdef file in your shell stub allows you to customize the project name, the icon location, bitmap location, and many other properties of your shell.  Go ahead and modify that file to customize your shell.

During the demo, I changed the name and the default web page.

Step 3 – Customize your menus

This is accomplished through the .VSCT file under the resources node in your Shell UI project.

Open the VSCT file and edit it.   Every line you uncomment will remove that item from the menu bar in your isolated shell.

If you want to use the same sample I used at the chalk talk, open the Storyboard.VSCT.TXT file attached to this blog post and copy and paste the contents in your own VSCT file (don’t forget to remove the existing values in there).

Step 4 – Remove unnecessary packages

To remove packages you don’t want to appear, you will need to add them to the .pkgundef file.

You can find the package GUIDs in the registry under: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\AppEnv\9.0\YourProject\Packages

For each package you wish to remove, add the registry key to the pkgundef file.  If you want to use the same customization from my talk, copy the contents from Storyboard.pkgundef.txt into your pkgundef file.

Step 5 – Add your own Help About box.

This is well documented here

Step 6 – Add your own packages

To add your own packages, right click on your solution and select Add -> Existing project.  Navigate to your project and add them to your product.  Remember to add the dependencies to your stub executable by:

-          Right click on the stub.exe project

-          Select Shell dependencies

-          Check the packages you just added to the solution

Add the DSL and DSLPackage from the Storyboard designer project.

That’s it for customizing your own shell.

The final step is to build your own setup for your binaries. 

Step 7 – Add your own templates

Grab the item templates zip file from the Storyboard Designer project and place it under %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\General\1033

You will need to touch the pkgdef, pkgundef or vsct file to get the /setup command to run which will extract the packages and make them available at runtime.

Step 8 – Build your own setup

This is also well documented here

Step 9 – Tying things together

The final deployment piece is to tie everything together.  This will require you to build your own setup chainer.  You have several options here including:

-          Create your own exe

-          Use the Setup project bootstrapper (Paul Stubbs has a good blog post here to get you started)

-          Use a third party setup project to do the chaining

You will need to chain in the VS Isolated shell first, and then chain in your own MSI you created in step 6.

That’s it.  By this point, you now have a full end to end product that you can post on the Visual Studio Gallery and share with the rest of the world.

While James and I have been out to conferences, the other two program managers on our team, Anthony and Ken have been busy with our websites.

Anthony has been working on the Visual Studio Gallery from day 1 and has just announced some new changes to the site.  Some of the changes include:

• Ability to rate extensions and filter on highest rated
• Ability to add comments about an extension
• A "Was this review helpful" feature for comments
• Extension authors can aggregate information about ratings on their extensions
• Search results have been "jazzed up" to provide a better summary of the results

 Ken's been busy updating the dev center and vastly improved the Learn tab.  He's added twenty new pages to the dev center a several links on how to get started with building your own extension.  One of the comments I got from my Chalk Talk at Tech Ed was the information was all other the place.  Ken has consolidated a lot of the training information and documents to one site to make it easier for you to get to help content.

Take a look at the updates and let us know what you think about them.

Today was the last day of the Tech Ed Developer's conference.  Next week will be the IT Pro conference which I won't be around for.  I'm definately looking forward to getting back home.  This week has been amazing and I've had the priviledge of meeting a lot of architects and developers who are getting excited about extending Visual Studio.

Things were a lot more quiet today as attendees were busy trying to leave and get back home.  We had less than half the people visit our booth today than the other days.  I had to peddle our pens and start handing them out to every person walking by to get rid of them.  In the end, we gave away 1000 pens this week and about half the cards that talked about our upcoming conference in September.

I did get a few good discussions going today with some attendees who shared their ideas with me on how they can extend Visual Studio.  A few people who attended my chalk talk also came by with some great questions on how to extend VS and where to get more information.  I programmed myself to keep telling them to start at our dev center, http://msdn.com/vsx.

I also received the initial results from the attendees about my chalk talk.  The evaluation grade was 7.5 / 9.  Not too bad.  I was hoping for a 8/9 but for my first chalk talk, I'm happy with it :)   A couple of attendees thought I would be going deeper into macros so the synopsis was misleading to them.  I also had a three straight 9s and some positive comments about the SDK.  It's re-energizing hearing how excited people are about building extensions!

For those who came up to the booth or attended my chalk talk, it was great meeting you and I definately look forward to hearing from you about the cool extensions you've built on top of VS.

For now, good bye Orlando :)

Today was my chalk talk at Tech Ed.  We were hoping for a good crowd and weren't disappointed.  The talk started at 10:15 but by 10, the room was already half full.  We ended up getting over 40 people attending and I was able to go through all my materials within an hour.  That left plenty of time for questions at the end and from the questions, there was a lot of interest in the shell. 

After the talk, several attendees came by our booth and we had a lot of in depth discussions about the shell, what they can do with it, and how to extend it.  It was awesome seeing their eyes light up and think about scenarios where they can use the shell.

I'm also attaching my slide deck to this posting.  The slides were "borrowed" from my manager from a previous talk with some edits from me :)

After the huge wave of folks from the chalk talk, the booth was pretty dead the rest of the day.  We did manage to give away a ton of pens, Code Magazines, and flyers to the VSX Conference in September to random passer bys.  Catherine from our marketing team also joined us in the booth so it was great seeing a marketing pro solicit our product.

For those who attended the chalk talk this morning, thanks for coming!  hopefully you'll be able to get started extending Visual Studio and building your own shell applications.

I've been promoting this at the booth at Tech Ed but also wanted to make sure I mention it on my blog.

We're having a VSX Developer Conference at Microsoft on September 15th and 16th.  It'll be a two day conference to go deep into developing extensions for Visual Studio, the VS shell, and DSL Tools.  The conference is open to the public and is pretty cheap - $100.  Compared to the price of Tech Ed, it's dirt cheap :)

For more information, visit http://msdn.com/vsx/conference

Sign up soon though as space is limited.

Hope to see you there.

Today was a little less hectic as I only had one shift from 11:45 am to 2:45 pm.

I chatted with a few random people on the bus and at lunch and the majority are enjoying the conference.  I've heard from three different people that they don't like the two week split format with the first week focusing on developers and the second week on IT professionals.  Those same attendees are responsible for IT and development and their companies won't let them stay for two weeks.

Since I had only one shift, I didn't get a chance to talk to a lot of people today.  We decided to just show the WoW Addon Shell video today over and over and it drew a lot of curious eyes.  We pulled in more folks interested in World of Warcraft than extensibility but once we started talking about extending VS and showing our cool pens, they showed a lot of interest.  I was able to convince another 5 or 6 people to come to my Chalk Talk tomorrow at 10:15am.

The feeling at the conference today was to get in as much as possible.  The sessions went ok yesterday but I heard of a few that were just horrible and folks left early to spend more time in the Hands on Labs.  I haven't tried the labs but will do that after my Chalk Talk.  I've been spending my free time prepping for the talk.

Tonight, the VSX team will have dinner with our VSIP partners at Seaworld.  I haven't been to Seaworld Orlando before so I'm looking forward to checking it out.  It'll also be great to finally see the faces of people I've talked to over email.

Tech Ed Day 1   

It’s hot in Orlando.  Real hot.  Extremely hot.  Lightning and flash storms also seem to be normal out here.

The city itself feels relatively new and had a boom the last decade as most of the buildings seem like they were recently built.

The Orange County Conference Center (the OCCC) is insanely huge.  The conference floor is also so big it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other.

Monday was Day 0 and we went to check out the conference center, set up our machine, and check in with registration.

Tuesday was Day 1.  Mariano, Gearard, and I hopped on a bus at 7:30am and got to the conference a little before 8:00am.  We made our way to the meal area and as we entered the main hall, we saw a huge line.  First I thought it was the meal line but then realized it was a line to get into the keynote.  Bill Gates would be presenting his last keynote as a Microsoft full time employee and it seems some people got up really early just to get a good seat.

We had breakfast and waited about 20 minutes for the line to get smaller before we joined in and entered the keynote area.  The keynote area itself was massive and about 3000 to 4000 people were there that morning.

The keynote started out well as Bill showed us the Director’s cut of the video – “Bill’s last day at Microsoft”.  A few additional clips were added so look for it when it gets on soapbox or youtube.

We saw some cool development tool demos using silverlight by Soma, some tool integration from Brian Harry, and some data layer tools from someone in SQL who I can’t remember right now J  Mariano and I had to leave the keynote early to get to our booth and prepare for the massive exodus of the attendees from the keynote to lecture hall.  We were right in the middle so as the stampede came by, we were chatting with them, explaining what “extensibility” meant and giving away our cool pens.

Other teams and partners had cool swag.  I saw a talking frog, a really powerful mini flashlight, a slinky, and one partner even brought a “booth babe” to the event.

I was pleasantly surprised that we had a lot of interest in extensibility and even had a lot of attendees come with problems or questions.  I fielded a few deployment questions, had one customer (former MS employee) complain about PLKs, then complain more about PLKs, and a lot of random questions about the shell.  It seems a lot of people had heard about the shell but wasn’t sure what it was.

We had the World of Warcraft Add in Studio demo playing on one of the monitors and that also drew a lot of interest.

I did two shifts today, a total of 7 hours standing and talking to attendees.  I think we had a few hundred people stop by to chat, take a pen, and learn more about Visual Studio extensibility.

We also talked about our VSX conference that is happening in Sept and there was a lot of interest in that as well.  Our $100 price tag was considered extremely cheap to all the attendees J

One of the coolest parts was to meet some of the VSIP partners at their booths and when they stopped by.  It was great to see people really using our product and getting excited about extending Visual Studio.

The oddest question I got was someone asking me where he could charge his cell phone as it just died.

I’m hoping tomorrow will be just as exciting.

Our booth duty schedule has been finalized for Tech Ed next week.

If you're coming to Tech Ed and want to chat with one of us, here are the times we'll be manning the Visual Studio Extensibility booth.

You're welcome to talk to Mariano, Gearard, Terry, or myself about anything.  In case you have specific things in mind to ask us and want to talk to a particular person, here are our roles:

• Quan - Program Manager
• Mariano - Developer
• Gearard - Developer in Test
• Terry - Business Development Manager

*Times and people are subject to change.

While in Orlando next week, there will be four of us staffing the VSX booth.  I'm still not 100% sure where the booth is but I've been told it'll be in the middle of the Developer Division booths.

We'll be giving away some cool swag so definately swing by if you'll be at Tech Ed.

I've spent most of my free time figuring out what to talk about at the Chalk Talk and spent some time today preparing what we'll show off at the booth.

We're going to have Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite installed with the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0.  In addition, I'll have the following Visual Studio extensions installed to demo:

Source Code Outliner

Iron Python studio

VSCT Powertoy

Storyboard designer

Power Commands

Wow Addon

All the extensions above are free downloads so try them out and come by if you have any questions on those extensions or just want to chat about Visual Studio Extensibility.

For VSIP partners, hope to see you at the VSIP partner event at Seaworld! :)

We just added a few more people to our small team.

Jean-Marc joined us a few months ago and is currently on a VSX European tour with James promoting Visual Studio Extensibility.  Jean-Marc is a Program Manager and will be based in the UK Office (tele-commuting from France).

Pedro is our new Dev lead.  Pedro comes to us with a wealth of knowledge about the DSL tools since he was the dev lead for Visual Studio Team Architect.

Don is our latest additoin and started this week.  Don will be working on our internal build processes and will be our main setup developer for the VS SDK.

Welcome aboard guys :)

We still have a few QA positions open.  If you can write code and have a passion for testing, send us your resume! :)

Aaron helped me figure this out as it puzzled me for a couple of days :)

It's also a topic at: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3377742&SiteID=1

If you create an isolated shell and then drop your VS packages into it, you won't be able to debug into any managed package until you change the debug settings to mixed mode.  The debugger defaults to "Auto" but it only loads the native symbols.

To enable debugging into your managed packages, try this:

1. Right click on your shell stub exe and select Properties
2. Go to the Configuration Properties / Debugging option
3. Change the Debugger Type from "Auto" to "Mixed"

This will now load the symbols for your managed packages and allow you to debug into it.

Note - your F5 experience will be a little slower.