Quan To's Visual Studio Extensibility blog

Our annual VSX Conference started today, the same day we officially announced and launched Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

For those who have an MSDN subscription, you can download VS 2010 Beta 2 right now.  If you don't have a subscription, the Microsoft download center will have it available on Wednesday.

Today's conference started with a keynote from Rico Mariani, our Chief Architect in VS.  As always Rico's talks are entertaining and provides a great insight to where we're going.  There were several other sessions today such as building editor extensions, an intro to extensibility, isolated shell customization, and I presented with Istvan Novak (one of our VSX Insiders) on how to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Extensions.

We covered what a VSIX is and showed the new Extension Manager bits inside of Beta 2.  For those who already have Beta 2, try downloading some of the project templates and tools that were recently uploaded the last few days.  Our first external partner (Tangible) uploaded an updated Beta 2 T4 editor this morning as well.  In addition, we updated the Source Outliner Powertoy and Power Commands.  Those have consistently been in our top 10 extensions for 2005 and 2008.

We ended the day with an "Ask the Experts" pavillion.  Our partners were also on hand to discuss their products as well.  I had several partners come up with VSIX and shell questions and ended the night getting a Cobol.Net shirt from Microfocus :)

I just put together a quick intro to the extension manager.  Consider it my 1 minute elevator pitch of what the extension manager is and what you can do with it.

Check it out on Channel 9 at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/cgranger/The-VS2010-Extension-Manager/

Our Visual Studio Gallery just got an update today with some small changes since our initial Beta 1 release a few weeks ago.

Steven Wilssens, our main PM working on the gallery sums up the changes below:

Feature Highlights

· Referrals Count – During our initial release we only counted the number of downloads for contributions with a payload. With this release we will be counting the number of click-throughs for projects with a referral link.

· Updated Details Page: Based on customer feedback we changed the layout of the details page.

· Support for integration with http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio: We added an xml files that allows http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio to display the recently added, highest rated, and most active contributions on Visual Studio Gallery.

· Notifications - Users now receive a notification when someone gives a rating, starts or replies to a discussion thread for their project, etc.

· Performance Increase – The overall site performance has increased significantly with this release thanks to changes that are shared across the Expression Gallery, Visual Studio Gallery, and CodePlex sites.

We’re targeting a regular cadence of updates on the Gallery.  If you have any feedback for us, feel free to post them to our Gallery forum.

Congrats to the MSDN team for a smooth update earlier today and I’m really happy with the performance improvements!

-Quan

Several partners have asked me how they can package up their Visual Studio 2010 Toolbox Controls as a VSIX and deploy it on the Visual Studio Gallery. In the past, we had a Toolbox Control Installer (TCI) which shipped as an MSM in the Visual Studio SDK. A developer building a toolbox control would include the MSM in their MSI which wrote a registry key at install time to let the Toolbox Control know there are new controls available, where they are, and to rebuild the cache. That's changed in VS 2010 and we've made it easier to deploy your Toolbox Control. The support came late in VS 2010 Beta 1 so we didn't include it in the SDK but here's a workaround if you want to try to get your toolbox control working as a VSIX for VS 2010 Beta 1.

Full support will be available in Beta 2.

Step 1: Build your toolbox control, test it, and verify it.

Step 2: Create a new VSIX Project by launching the New Project dialog, select C#, Extensibility, and pick the VSIX Project in the middle pane

Step 3: In your VSIX Project, add the files related to your toolbox control.  You can do this using the Add New Item content menu.

Step 4:

Create a new .pkgdef file and add it as an item to your project.  The .pkgdef file should be named <YourProject>.pkgdef and it should contain the following info:

[$RootKey$\ToolboxControlsInstaller\WinControl, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1631b3e7a8fbcce5, processorArchitecture=MSIL]
@="Litware Controls"
"Codebase"="$PackageFolder$\WinControl.dll"

Change the WinControl, Version…. part to match the assembly name of your control.  This must be an exact match.

Change the @ property to the name of your control.

Change the Codebase property to point to your DLL.  This is assuming the DLL is in the root of the VSIX, which ends up being installed to the $PackageFolder$ directory on disk.

If you're building a WPF Control, you'll need to add one additional key/value pair:      "WPFControls"="1"

Add that in your pkgdef file below your codebase statement.

Step 5:

For all the additional files you added to your VSIX project, select each one, go to the property grid and mark the “Copy To Output” item to “Copy always”

There’s an SDK bug that you will also need to mark the image files as well as “Copy always”.  These are the VSIXProject_Large.png and VSIXProject_Small.png.

Step 6:

Open the VSIX Manifest and modify it to add your own unique ID, company name, version, etc.

In the Content section, click on the drop down and Select VS Package.  In the column beside it, type in the name of your pkgdef file.

Don’t forget to Save your changes.

Step 7:

Build.

Once you finish building, you’ll see a VSIX file in your output directory.

Step 8:

Test your extension by double clicking on the VSIX file to install it. 

You’ll need to restart VS.

Step 9:

Verify your control shows up in the Extension Manager and in the Toolbox Control.

And that’s it.  You’ve successfully created a VSIX package for your control.

Now go ahead and share it with the world on the Visual Studio Gallery!

I just got forwarded this Channel 9 video posted a couple of weeks ago:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-on-C9-VS-2010-Beta-1-Windows-API-Code-Pack--a-WPF-Jukebox/

Dan and Brian talk about several new VS 2010 Beta 1 features including the Extension Manager, PLKs and the Integrated and Isolated Shells, and other new features and changes in the product.

This blog gets a shout out in the video :)

Our Visual Studio Chief Architect, Rico Mariani, wrote up a great blog about why we haven't moved to a 64 bit version of Visual Studio. 

I've been asked this several times from partners and customers and I've gotten different responses asking the same question to other folks in the developer division.  Atleast Rico has put into perspective why we're not moving in that direction at this time.

This is definitely worth a few minutes to read:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx

It's always great to see your General Manager excited about a feature you worked on.  It's nice to see him mention it in his blog.  It's even better when he sits down and writes an entire blog post about your feature!

I demo'ed the Extension Manager and SDK to Jason Zander (my boss' boss' boss' boss) a few weeks back.  He was aware of the feature and showed it at a few of his own demos but saw the end to end demo for the first time during my demo.  I'm glad he loved it and although there's still work for us, we're definnitely heading in the right direction.

You can read Jason's blog from here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/06/01/visual-studio-2010-sdk-beta-1-is-now-live.aspx

After you've read it, go build your own extension and share it with the world! :)

I updated our Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK readme a few days ago but I wanted to call this out in case someone else ran into this and needed a workaround.

Problem:

When I try installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK, it crashes when I click Next during the setup process.

Reason:

This is a tad embarassing.  When we cleaned up our installer from Visual Studio 2008 SDK SP1, we removed some strings related to blocking the SP1 install if the RTM SDK was present.  The problem is we didn't remove the check itself.  If you have the VS 2008 SDK RTM and then try installing the 2010 Beta 1 SDK, one of our checks fire and then tries to get the help text to tell you to remove the older SDK.  Since we removed the string, the resource returned is null and the strng formatter chokes and throws an exception, causing the setup to crash.  We've gone ahead and fixed this but unfortunately, it was found after we released the Beta 1 SDK.

Workaround:

The workaround is pretty simple and you have two options.

1) Uninstall the VS 2008 RTM SDK (and update to SP1)

2) Extract the setup exe and launch the MSI directly:

We quietly shipped the Visual Studio Integrated and Isolated Shells when Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 was released.

The shells are still work in progress as we made some changes since VS 2008 SP1.  Both shells will have all the new goodness that came with VS 2010 including the WPF UI and feature updates to the web components, a brand new MEF based Editor, along with xcopy pkgdef support.  Another big change was we moved the shell setup to use the same setup engine as the main VS product.

You can download and try out the shells from here:

Integrated Shell: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ee907896-e8f4-4378-9405-2593ddb38376&displaylang=en

Isolated Shell: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=308b82aa-39f9-456e-b6d7-5d348b6f7015&displaylang=en

To create extensions that work on the shell, you'll need to also get the Visual Studio 2010. (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=147422)

You'll also notice the Shells are a lot bigger than what we shipped in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.  We're carrying both the 3.5 and 4.0 .NET Framework redist packages inside the shells at this time.  This will be fixed in Beta 2 as we remove those and replace them with the small web download for the Frameworks which will reduce the shell redist sizes back to the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 levels (120-150 MB).

The VSIX file is the unit of deployment for a Visual Studio 2010 Extension.  Visual Studio will recognize the VSIX extension and install the contents of the file to the right location.

A VSIX file is a zip file that uses the Open Packaging Convention.  You can rename the .VSIX extension to .ZIP and use any zip browser (including the Windows File Explorer) to browse its contents.

A simple VSIX file will contain the following:

During installation, Visual Studio will unzip the contents of the VSIX file into:       %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\<Company>\<Product>\<Version>

On launch, Visual Studio will look in the Extensions folder and its child folders for extensions and load them.  Extensions that are installed by Visual Studio either through the Extension Manager UI, or through the out of process installer launched by double clicking on a VSIX file, will automatically be enabled.

Extensions that are xcopied to that location as a raw folder layout will be disabled by default.  They can be enabled via the Extension Manager UI inside of Visual Studio. 

To create a basic VSIX file, perform the following:

1)      Create a [Content_Types].xml file

2)      Create an extension.vsixmanifest file

3)      Copy your payload to that location

4)      Select all the files

5)      Right click

6)      Select "Send To"

7)      Select "Compressed (zipped) folder"

8)      Rename the file extension to .VSIX

Alternatively, you can install the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK and create an extension.  All of our VS Extension project templates will now generate a VSIX for you when you build the extension.

For those wondering what VSIX actually stands for, it really isn't an acronym.  Our original intent was to replace VSI (Visual Studio Installer) and with most things, we tacked an "x" on the end.  I actually wanted to use the .VSX extension but Visio beat me to it.  We tried a bunch of other extensions and eventually decided to use .VSIX.  If we really need to cram in an acronym, I guess we can use "Visual Studio Installer for eXtensions".

One of our Visual Studio Extensibility MVPs just put together a great blog about why you should learn about VS 2010 Extensibility.

Check out Istvan Novak's blog at:

Five Reasons to Learn VS 2010 Extensibility

As a side note, there have been a lot of other exciting things happening the last few days:

• The DSL SDK Beta 1 just shipped
• Our Beta 1 extensibility forum has launched
• The Visual Studio Gallery activity has picked up and several new and cool extensions have been uploaded.  Check them out.

If you have any Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 extensibility questions with the Extension Manager, VSIX, pkgdef files, moving extensions to VS 2010, SDK, or anything related to extending Visual Studio, you can post your questions at our Beta 1 Extensibility forum:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsxprerelease/threads

We will be monitoring the forum during the Beta 1 cycle and will try to respond to your questions, concerns, and comments as soon as possible.

-Quan

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Reference Assistant extension for Visual Studio in my blog.  I've been working closely with Darren Stokes to produce a Visual Studio 2010 version.  Darren was quickly able to put together a VS 2010 version of his product and has it packaged up as a VSIX file.  That means you can now go to the Extension Manager UI in VS 2010 Beta 1 and download Reference Assistant. 

You can also get it directly from the VS Gallery from here but I'd suggest finding and downloading it from the Extension Manager instead :)

We have a few more VSIP partners who are getting ready to also ship their extensions online so keep an eye out for that.

One of our Editor Developers (Noah Richards) has uploaded the first and second Visual Studio extension on the new Visual Studio Gallery.

The two extensions are a Wiki Classifier that shows .mwiki files in a nice easily readable format inside the VS Editor and a Diff/Patch classifier that handles .diff and .patch files, and also displays them in a easily readable format inside the Editor.

Our Shell PM, Weston Hutchins posted our first downloadable VS Template.  It's a VB Card Game Starter Kit (originally built back in VS 2005 and updated to work for VS 2010).

After you install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, launch the New Project Dialog, go online and you can try out the Card Game Starter Kit.

If you go to the Extension Manager, you'll also be able to see and download the Card Game starter kit, along with the two classifier extensions.

Expect more extensions to be posted in the coming days from our partners and other Microsoft engineers.

It looks like the guys over in Jetbrains are starting to work on their Visual Studio 2010 Resharper extension!

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2009/05/preview-of-resharper-for-visual-studio-2010-coming-soon/

As a huge fan of Resharper, I can't wait till this is available in June.  I talked to these guys a few weeks ago at the VSIP clinic and they're going to try to make this available as a download through the Extension Manager as well.

Looking forward to it.