VSX Team Blog : VS Gallery

How do I create and share a template on the Visual Studio Gallery?

vsxteam — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:58:00 GMT

One of the questions we've been getting from developers is, "How do I build a project or item template?"

Our Dev lead, Pedro Silva put together four great blogs on how to create, build, and share your template on the Visual Studio Gallery.

Creating an Item Template:

The blog posts are about creating an item template but the steps are very similar if you want to create a project template.

Take a look at his detailed blog post and start building your own templates! :)

Tangible T4 Editor for VS 2010 Beta 2

vsxteam — Sat, 23 May 2009 04:34:00 GMT

The Tangible T4 Editor is now available for VS 2010 Beta 2. Try out the T4 Editor when working with your VS 2010 DSLs. You can download the T4 Editor from the Visual Studio Gallery or look for it in the Extension Manager Online tab.

VSX Community Letter for June 2008

vsxteam — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:13:24 GMT

This month's letter includes information about Microsoft's first VSX Developer Conference, updates to the VSX Developer Center, updates to the Visual Studio Gallery, and the new VSX Flash Newsletter. Also included is information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past month, event news on VSX, more VSX content online, and a preview of what's coming next month.

What's new with the VSX team

Our team has been working on the next version of the VS SDK release, which targets VS 2008 SP1 once it is released later this year. While we are working on what will be called VS SDK 2008 SDK 1.1, we are also working on a new major version of the VS SDK targeting the next major version of Visual Studio. We will have more details about this to disclose later this year. Many of our team members have been at events such as TechEd and the VSX Tour in Europe.

VSX at TechEd

Some of our team members including Quan To, Mariano Blanco, and Gearard Boland were at TechEd in early June. The VSX booth was open daily from 8:30am to 6:00pm and had nearly 1000 visitors total. There was a general excitement about the possibilities of the VS Shell and they had a lot of interest with excellent questions during the week. In addition to booth duty, Quan gave a chalk talk about the Isolated Shell which was well attended. They nearly filled up the small theatre that the talk was in. Some attendees were also there to complain to us about how difficult the VS SDK was to use once you wanted to do more complex things. A few people wanted to know when we’ll finally get rid of the PLK for deployment of VSPackages.

VSX Tour (Spring 2008)

One of the VSX Tour (Spring 2008) presentations by James Lau and Jean-Marc Prieur is now online for on demand viewing (about 2 hours total), posted by Katrien.

VSX - Extend your development Experience - Part 1

VSX - Extend your development Experience - Part 2

VSX - Extend your development Experience - Part 3

VSX - Extend your development Experience - Part 4

VSX - Extend your development Experience - Part 5

Below are the links to the various trip report details from James for each event location:

VSX Developer Conference 2008

Meet the VSX team and many others from Microsoft, as well as hundreds of developers from around the world who are members of the VSIP program and the VSX developer community, at Microsoft's first VSX DevCon: http://msdn.com/vsx/conference

This fall, Microsoft is hosting a developer conference to teach developers how to extend Visual Studio. Visual Studio is an open, extensible platform that can be customized for everything from individual productivity tools to enterprise-wide development needs. The Visual Studio Shell enables developers to leverage a world class IDE to build specialized tools for any number of vertical industries, and can even be custom-branded with your own splash screen and app icon.

Join us September 15th & 16th, 2008 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington for two full days of sessions. Each day will have two session tracks presented by Microsoft product team members and industry influencers.

Registration Fee: $100

Microsoft Main Campus
Conference Center
Redmond, WA

A broad range of Visual Studio extensibility topics will be presented including:

• Visual Studio extensibility overview

• Future of Visual Studio

• Using the Visual Studio SDK

• Building applications based on the free Visual Studio Shell

• Programming language service integration

• Building custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools

• Team Foundation Server (TFS) extensibility

• Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) extensibility

• Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)

• And many more VSX topics!

All attendees will receive a free copy of the book Professional Visual Studio Extensibility.

VS extension tip of the month

Check out the DocProject.

DocProject is a set of project templates, a Visual Studio Add-In and an API that provide an extensible platform for building complied help using Microsoft Sandcastle in Visual Studio 2005, 2008, C# Express, VB.NET Express, on the command-line using MSBuild, on a build server such as Team Build, or in the DocProject External UI program.

VSX Survey

Please take a few minutes and complete the VSX Survey (Spring 2008) to let us know your interests, activities, and feedback on the topic of extending Visual Studio. We will soon be sharing many of the results of our past survey and this new survey, so that those of you who take the time to fill out the survey can learn more about what the VSX community is doing and saying.

Visual Studio Gallery phase 2 updates rollout

The Visual Studio Gallery site has many new features added, part of an overall phase 2 site feature update rollout this month. Summarized from Anthony Cangialosi's blog post The Visual Studio Gallery gets a little more community friendly:
New features added:

Users can now contribute their own ratings on the quality extensions they’ve tried
Visitors can optionally provide a detailed review about the extensions
We’ve added a Review Tab were visitors can sort through the various reviews on an extension
The “Was this review helpful” lets other browsers sort credible reviews from the rest
Authors of an extension now get aggregate information about the ratings of their extension
Last we jazzed up the category & search results page giving a better summary of the matching extensions

More features coming soon:

Author contributed Tags for extensions
RSS Feeds for each category
Tag based RSS feeds
Improvements to the new Categories list page
Improved Submission form

VSX Developer Center updates

The VSX Developer Center at http://msdn.com/vsx has been significantly updated this month. There are 20 new pages added to the VSX dev center. One overall new navigation feature you will notice is under the top red navigation tabs there is a gray sub TOC menu bar, which appears when current main tab page that has sub pages.

For the home page, you will see a VSX Site Map link on the far left of the sub TOC (Table of Contents) menu bar. There is also a sub TOC menu link at the top of the Home page for the VSX DevCon 2008 event page. Click on the VSX Site Map link to view a complete link list of all the pages directly associated with the VSX dev center.

Check out the significant updates and UI enhancements to the Downloads, Support.

Based on developer feedback as well as our own goals of making the end to end story for VSX developers easier, we have created a new web page on the VSX dev center: Generate Load Keys. This form is a more simple, quick, and easy process of obtaining PLKs and SLKs.

The updated Community page includes links to many VSX related bloggers (both Microsoft and community), and there is a new section on that page for Social Bookmarks on the topic of VSX.

Visit the Social Bookmarks site to learn more about them and how you can create and share them. Bookmarks created that include the vsx tag will be included in the VSX Social Bookmarks listing and VSX Social Bookmarks RSS feed. Or view the VSX topics using a VSX tag filter for Social Bookmarks.

The Learn pages have significant updates with 6 major blocks of content links along with 18 new sub pages that are part of the VSX learning content. Also the 6 key links listed on the gray sub TOC menu bar on the Learn page. The VSX Site Map page shows all the pages under the Learn category.

We will continue to improve and add to the content listed off the Learn page of the VSX dev center, as well as enhance the VS SDK documentation (content, links, and navigation). Feel free to send suggestions for VSX content to be added, layout and navigation of the VSX dev center, and any community related links that should be considered for future updates.

Sign-up for the VSX Flash Newsletter email subscription

The VSX team has created a formal recurring communication email newsletter to provide the latest news, announcements, and special offers related to VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility), the VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partners) program, and the Visual Studio Gallery.

While we will continue post monthly VSX Community Letters here on the VSX Team Blog, this email subscription will be similar to formal subscriptions like the MSDN Flash and specific technology email newsletters, either in HTML or Text format (see screenshot of sign-up page below).

We expect to send a formal newsletter summary monthly, with some months including an additional email news flash for significant announcements like a new download of the VS SDK available, new events, special offers, etc. Sign-up today at the link below:

Visual Studio Extensibility Flash Newsletter

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more new technical content online for VSX (whitepapers and deep dives into samples), more updates to the VSX dev center, and more features added to the Visual Studio Gallery site including RSS support.

Please send your feedback to us via the Contact link on any of our team member blogs, or post a technical question in the MSDN Forum for VSX. You can also email me directly at klevy@microsoft.com or using the Email link on my blog.

Ken Levy
Program Manager
Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy
http://msdn.com/vsx

Visual Studio Gallery phase 2 updates rollout

vsxteam — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:56:02 GMT

The Visual Studio Gallery site has many new features added, part of an overall phase 2 site feature update rollout this month.

Summarized from Anthony Cangialosi's blog post The Visual Studio Gallery gets a little more community friendly:

New features added:

Users can now contribute their own ratings on the quality extensions they’ve tried
Visitors can optionally provide a detailed review about the extensions
We’ve added a Review Tab were visitors can sort through the various reviews on an extension
The “Was this review helpful” lets other browsers sort credible reviews from the rest
Authors of an extension now get aggregate information about the ratings of their extension
Last we jazzed up the category & search results page giving a better summary of the matching extensions

More features coming soon:

Author contributed Tags for extensions
RSS Feeds for each category
Tag based RSS feeds
Improvements to the new Categories list page
Improved Submission form

VSX Developer Conference 2008

vsxteam — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:53:09 GMT

VSX DevCon 2008: http://msdn.com/vsx/conference

This fall, Microsoft is hosting a developer conference to teach developers how to extend Visual Studio. Visual Studio is an open, extensible platform that can be customized for everything from individual productivity tools to enterprise-wide development needs. The Visual Studio Shell enables developers to leverage a world class IDE to build specialized tools for any number of vertical industries, and can even be custom-branded with your own splash screen and app icon.

Join us September 15th & 16th, 2008 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington for two full days of sessions. Each day will have two session tracks presented by Microsoft product team members and industry influencers.

Meet the VSX team and many others from Microsoft, as well as hundreds of developers from around the world who are members of the VSIP program and the VSX developer community.

Registration Fee: $100

Microsoft Main Campus
Conference Center
Redmond, WA

A broad range of Visual Studio extensibility topics will be presented including:

• Visual Studio extensibility overview

• Future of Visual Studio

• Using the Visual Studio SDK

• Building applications based on the free Visual Studio Shell

• Programming language service integration

• Building custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools

• Team Foundation Server (TFS) extensibility

• Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) extensibility

• Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)

• And many more VSX topics!

VSX Community Letter for May 2008

vsxteam — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:19:00 GMT

This month's letter includes a summary of what newly released VS SDK beta for the VS 2008 SP1 beta (formally referred to as VS 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta. Also included is information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past month, event news on VSX, more VSX content online, and a preview of what's coming next month.

What's new with the VSX team

Our team released a beta of our next version of the VS SDK this week, more details the VS SDK section below. We will release the final version of VS SDK 2008 SDK 1.1 when the final release of SP1 for VS 2008 is released later this year. As mentioned last month, the VSX team is working on a parallel project developing a new major version of the VS SDK that is targeted for CTP beta sometime next year. This new future new version of the VS SDK will include additional features and design tools for extending VS to make VSX easier as well as more powerful.

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta available

Microsoft recently released beta downloads of the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. Below are various downloads related to the SP1 betas online for VS and the VS Shell:

Additional details about the VS Shell SP1 beta runtime updates can be found in Quan To's blog post these downloads:

The integrated shell is a subset of the main Visual Studio patch and only targets the Integrated Shell. If you have any edition of Visual Studio Standard and above, and also have the Integrated Shell installed, you should only install the main Visual Studio patch. If you don't have any Visual Studio 2008 editions installed and just have the integrated shell, install the integrated shell patch and save yourself about 60 extra megabytes.

The Isolated Shell release is a major upgrade. It will uninstall the previous RTM version and install the latest Isolated Shell Beta on your machine. That means it's not a patch but a full version of the Isolated Shell.

For those who worked with the Integrated and Isolated shells back in November, you'll notice a significant size reduction in the redists. The main size reduction knocking out about 150 megabytes is the .NET Framework redist. Instead of carrying the entire payload, we're carrying a small bootstrapper that will go and download the Framework if you don't have it on your machine. If you do, it just by passes that part of the install and moves onto installing the other pieces.

All these installs will not affect previous version of Visual Studio so if you have Visual Studio 2002, 2003, or 2005, it is safe to apply these patches to your Visual Studio 2008 install.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta available

Yesterday we released the latest version of the VS 2008 SDK which targets the new VS 2008 SP1 Beta:

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta

Note: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta is required to be installed to use the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta.

Here are the highlights of what is new and updated since the VS 2008 SDK 1.0 since our RTM release include:

The VS Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated runtime files are now approximately 150MB smaller, nearly half the size as before. The runtime files no longer include the full .NET Framework 3.5 payload embedded. Instead, they now contain a bootstrapper that automatically downloads the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime from a separate download online if it is not installed on the target computer.
Added support for progress feedback in a chained installation. The VS Shell Isolated and VS Shell Integrated runtime files can now pass installation progress back to the chaining process. This allows developers to display accurate progress in their setup programs.
VS Shell development now supports normal user. Developing and deploying a VS Shell application no longer requires the developer to be an administrator on a Windows XP computer or to have elevated privileges on a Windows Vista computer.
The SQL Server team has provided a new XML Tree Editor sample.
Addition documentation about the VS Shell has been added.

The Readme for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta can be found online posted on Quan To's blog, the same readme document included in the SDK beta download.

Test engineer jobs available on the VSX team

The VSX team is hiring! We have several positions open, one for a test lead as well as several individual testers for our QA (Quality Assurance) team.

VSX at events

Some of our team members including Quan To, Mariano Blanco, and Gearard Boland will be at TechEd in June, so if you are at that event he first week of June, be sure to stop by the VSX station in the Microsoft learning center to talk to them.

VSX Tour - Spring 2008 in Europe

Our team members James Lau and Jean-Marc Prieur are on a community event tour in Europe over the next 3 weeks. Stay tuned to James' blog for event news and summaries during and after the tour.

May 20: Brussels, Belgium - VISUG
May 22: Amsterdam, Netherlands - DevDays 2008
May 26: Munich, Germany - Special invitation Microsoft event
May 29: Zurich, Switzerland - MSUGS
June 2: Prague, Czech Republic - Altairis
June 5: Budapest, Hungary - VSX Day at Microsoft

VS extension tip of the month
This month, the extension tip is about the XML tools included in Visual Studio 2008, as well as the brand new XML Schema Explorer added to SP1 of Visual Studio 2008. For more details, check out the XML Team's blog post with details and a screenshots: New XSD Functionality in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1

This new utility, created by the Data Programmability team within Microsoft using the VS SDK, was discussed in the article in our VSX CoDe Focus magazine issue written by Chris Lovett: How XML Tools Use the Visual Studio SDK

For more on XML tools in VS 2008, Stan Kitsis, program manager on the Data Programmability at Microsoft, has an article for CoDe magazine that is now online: XML Tools in Visual Studio 2008:

Editing XML files
Schema cache and catalogs
Performance and working with large files
XSLT debugging
Extending XML Tools

New deep dives for PowerCommands on LearnVSXNow!
István Novák continues his series of VSX related educational content he calls LearnVSXNow! with new deep dives for the free PowerCommands extension for VS.

Part 21: PowerCommands Deep Dive — Analyzing Commands
I go deep into the code of the following commands: Clear All Panes, Clear Recent Project and File List, Close All, Undo Close.
Part 20: PowerCommands Deep Dive — Commands and UI
In this part I dive into details about PowerCommands UI. We look how option pages are created, integrated into the Options dialog and how related settings are persisted. We also examine the Model-View-Presenter pattern used to implement a few UI with WPF.
Part 19: PowerCommands Deep Dive — Command Architecture
In this post we take a look at the architecture of the free PowerCommands tool package and go into details on how commands are defined and executed.

VSX topic now on Wikipedia

The VSX community has created a new VSX topic page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSX. We look forward to seeing how the community evolves this wiki page.

VSX book now available at Microsoft Company Store
The Microsoft company store now stocks the Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, which is significant since only select technical books are stocked in the Microsoft Company Store in Redmond for Microsoft employees. We find that there is a growing number of VSX developers within Microsoft outside the VSX team, with various product teams extending VS for either internal use or for parts of various products based on the VS platform.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more news from the team, additional VSX content online, some significant news about a special VSX event later this year, and new phase 2 features for the Visual Studio Gallery website including RSS support, tagging, comments, and more.

Please send your feedback to us via the Contact link on any of our team member blogs, or post a technical question in the MSDN Forum for VSX. You can also email me directly at klevy@microsoft.com or using the Email link on my blog.

VSX Survey (Spring 2008) invitation

Please take a few minutes and complete the VSX Survey (Spring 2008) to let us know your interests, activities, and feedback on the topic of extending Visual Studio.

There are 6 web pages with 23 multiple choice and fill-in-the blank questions in this survey. This is our second VSX survey, as we plan to offer a similar survey every 6 months and track the trends from the results. So if you took our VSX survey last fall, it's important to us that you take this survey with similar or updated answers and feedback.

Visual Studio is a rich extensible platform. As more and more developers continue to build extensions, the VSX team wants to ensure we are focusing on the right priorities for VSX developers. Your response will help Microsoft provide improved features and tools for extending Visual Studio and enhance the overall Visual Studio platform and ecosystem.

Ken Levy
Program Manager
Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy
http://msdn.com/vsx

VSX Community Letter for April 2008

vsxteam — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:42:00 GMT

This month's letter includes a summary of what our plans are for upcoming new versions of the VS SDK, the updated VSX developer center, information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past few months, event news on VSX, some new VSX projects released, more VSX content online, and a preview of what's coming next month.

What's new with the VSX team

Our team continues to work on upcoming releases of the Visual Studio SDK for VS 2008 as well as planning around the next version of Visual Studio. Our current plan is to release a CTP beta version of an updated VS SDK for VS 2008 sometime in May, followed by a finalized version of this next revision update later this year. This updated version of the VS SDK will contain various bug fixes and enhancements along with a small set of features targeting customer pain points. In parallel with this, we are also working on a new major version of the VS SDK that is targeted for CTP beta sometime next year, and this new major release will include many new features and functionary for extending VS, including what we call tools for tools.

For some additional discussion on what we have planned around future releases of the VS SDK, check out my video interview: Quan To talks about VS SDK development and releases.

Jean-Marc Prieur joins VSX team!

Check out Jean-Marc Prieur's blog. Jean-Marc was an MVP located in France, and he has joined Microsoft on the VS Ecosystem team, he will work out of our Cambridge, UK offices. Jean-Marc worked on DSLFactory.org, check out his blog post about it Some of DslFactory's work explained : (1/4) the VSX Day. Here is Jean-Marc's bio:

After studies in Ecole Superieure d'Electricite (Supelec), and a Master of Science at Caltech (mainly studying concurrent computing and computational neural systems), I got passionate about software modeling, more specifically graphical software modeling, meta-modeling. I was a passionate early adopter of DSL Tools, and had the chance to be technical reviewer the DSL book by Steve, Stuart, Gareth, and Allan. With a few friends, we created the French http://www.dslfactory.org community at the origin of several labs, workshops on DSL Tools, and a VSX Day in Paris. I joined the Cambridge Visual Studio Ecosystem in March 2008 as a Program Manager, and I will work with the VSX team in adding new features to DSL Tools and enhancing the Visual Studio SDK.

Visual Studio Gallery extension listings

The number of listings on Visual Studio Gallery continues to increase, now at 567 total as of today. We have new features coming to the site in a few months, including RSS feed, tagging, ratings, comments, and more.

VSX Developer Center updated

The Visual Studio Extensibility Developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx was updated again this month new content on the home page, including VSX team member photos, aggregated team member blog post content, and other aggregated content via RSS.

VSX FAQ Blog created for scenario based resource references

VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility) FAQ (frequently asked questions). We created a new blog for VSX FAQ topics which are scenario based More information at Welcome to the VSX FAQ blog.

VSX on Channel 9

Doug Hodges: The history of Visual Studio Extensibility
Last year I interviewed Doug Hodges, a Principal Software Architect on the Visual Studio platform team, discussing the history of the Visual Studio IDE. Doug is often referred to as the father (or cool uncle) of the original Visual Studio IDE shell. The text transcript for this interview is available in the online edition of VSX edition of CoDe Focus magazine.

Last month we had two videos posted on Channel 9, in case you missed them:

Channel 9: Anthony Cangialosi and Ken Levy: Visual Studio Gallery

Channel 9: Ken Levy and Aaron Marten: Visual Studio 2008 Extensibility

Community and MVP discussion on Channel 9

Sean O'Driscoll: General Manager for Community Support and the MVP Program
In this video, I interview Sean O'Driscoll discussing the history, current state, and future of Microsoft MVPs and the MVP Program.

New "How Do I?" Videos for Visual Studio Extensibility

There are several new How Do I videos on VSX published, and you can subscribe to the "RSS feed for "How Do I?" videos for VS and VSX. These are great videos created by VSX developers Hilton Giesenow and Dylan Miles. We now have 34 How-Do-I videos on VSX as of today.

Tutorial for creating a simple managed project system in Visual Studio

Our VSX UE (User Education) team has posted a detailed tutorial, Tutorial: A Simple Managed Project System, on their blog on creating a new managed project system using the VS SDK for VS 2008. This is the first in a series of tutorials from our VSX UE team explaining how to create and expand a Visual Studio project system.

More articles on LearnVSXNow!

István Novák continues his awesome series of VSX related educational content he calls LearnVSXNow!. I had great chat with Istvan during dinner a few nights ago, as he is here in Seattle this week for the annual MVP Summit event.

VSX at events

Both Anthony Cangialosi and Gareth Jones spoke on VSX (including DSL tools) at VSLive conference recently. Some of our team members including Quan To will be at TechEd in June, while I may be doing a VSX community tour around part of Europe in late May and early June (stay tuned more details on locations and dates).

VS extension tip of the month

We recently posted PowerCommands 1.1 for Visual Studio 2008, an enhanced version over the initial 1.0 version. On the day it was released, Scott Guthrie blogged about PowerCommands. As of later today or tomorrow, the download count for PowerCommands will pass 10,000. Check out the post PowerCommands 1.1 released for additional details about what is new in version 1.1. Another post to read about it is Pablo Galiano's blog about PowerCommands 1.1, he is the vendor developer we had create PowerCommands.

Additional VS extensions and VS SDK tools released

Here are some additional VSX related releases in the past month:

New version of T4 Editor coming soon from Clarius

The T4 Editor by Clarius Consulting can be found at http://www.t4editor.net/. Victor Aprea of Clarius blogged about their new version currently in development: T4 Editor: some teasing pictures!

We're receiving emails everyday asking us about the status of the T4 Editor. The news is we're still working on it and we're making some great progress! Just so you can check the wait is being worth it, I'm posting here a few screenshots that showcase the main feature we're working on, which is full support for embedded code blocks, that is, the same great support you get today from the ASP.NET editor when embedding C# or VB code.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more news from the team, additional VSX content online, and additional information about our next version of the VS SDK for VS 2008.

Please send your feedback to us via the Contact link on any of our team member blogs, or post a technical question in the MSDN Forum for VSX. You can also email me directly at klevy@microsoft.com or using the Email link on my blog.

Ken Levy
Program Manager
Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy
http://msdn.com/vsx

PowerCommands 1.1 released

vsxteam — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:42:33 GMT

PowerCommands 1.1 for Visual Studio 2008 is now available for free download, along with the updated source code and enhanced readme document.

The shortcut URL for this project is http://code.msdn.com/PowerCommands.

For some additional information about PowerCommands, refer to the original blog post announcing version 1.0: PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 released

Earlier today, Scott Guthrie blogged about it: April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008: A free set of useful extensions for VS 2008 that add a bunch of cool features to the IDE.

One of the new features in version 1.1 is Enable/Disable of each power command via the Options dialog. This new feature was actually the idea of a developer who downloaded version 1.0 and then posted this new feature suggestion in the Issue Tracker section of the Code Gallery project.

Below is a list of the new commands in version 1.1 (now 23 commands total):

Enable/Disable PowerCommands in Options dialog
This feature allows you to select which commands to enable in the Visual Studio IDE. Point to the Tools menu, then click Options. Expand the PowerCommands options, then click Commands. Check the commands you would like to enable.

Format document on save / Remove and Sort Usings on save
The Format document on save option formats the tabs, spaces, and so on of the document being saved. It is equivalent to pointing to the Edit menu, clicking Advanced, and then clicking Format Document. The Remove and sort usings option removes unused using statements and sorts the remaining using statements in the document being saved.

Clear All Panes
This command clears all output panes. It can be executed from the button on the toolbar of the Output window.

Copy Path
This command copies the full path of the currently selected item to the clipboard. It can be executed by right-clicking one of these nodes in the Solution Explorer:
The solution node; A project node; Any project item node; Any folder.

Email CodeSnippet
To email the lines of text you select in the code editor, right-click anywhere in the editor and then click Email CodeSnippet.

Insert Guid Attribute
This command adds a Guid attribute to a selected class. From the code editor, right-click anywhere within the class definition, then click Insert Guid Attribute.

Show All Files
This command shows the hidden files in all projects displayed in the Solution Explorer when the solution node is selected. It enhances the Show All Files button, which normally shows only the hidden files in the selected project node.

Undo Close
This command reopens a closed document , returning the cursor to its last position. To reopen the most recently closed document, point to the Edit menu, then click Undo Close. Alternately, you can use the CtrlShiftZ shortcut.
To reopen any other recently closed document, point to the View menu, click Other Windows, and then click Undo Close Window. The Undo Close window appears, typically next to the Output window. Double-click any document in the list to reopen it.

VSX Community Letter for March 2008

vsxteam — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:56:00 GMT

This month's letter includes a summary of our new Visual Studio Gallery website we launched a few weeks ago, the updated VSX developer center, information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past few months, event news on VSX, some new VSX projects released, more VSX content online, and a preview of what's coming next month.

What's new with the VSX team

Our team continues to work on upcoming releases of the Visual Studio SDK for VS 2008 as well as planning around the next version of Visual Studio. We have part of our team working on the next update for the VS SDK while others work on following versions that will include more tools within the VS SDK itself. Our team is working on determining when the next release of the VS SDK will be, and we expect to know more details on that next month. We are determining if we want to release an updated VS SDK soon with very small changes or wait a bit longer to release a newer VS SDK which contains more significant enhancements.

While we work on upcoming versions of the VS SDK, we are also working reducing the size of the VS Shell runtimes. One thing we plan to ship when VS 2008 Service Pack 1 ships, is to re-release the VS Shell runtimes. The new redistributable packages will not include the actual .NET Framework 3.5 installation bits. The new VS Shell chainer feature will still automatically check for the .NET Framework 3.5 and install it as needed. This will reduce the size of the VS Shell setup by about 200 MB.

Visual Studio Gallery announced

Our team is still buzzing with enthusiasm from our recent launch of the new Visual Studio Gallery website. For additional news and announcements for the Visual Studio Gallery:

VSX Team blog: Visual Studio Gallery announced
Soma's blog (our developer division senior VP): Visual Studio Gallery
Anthony Cangialosi's blog: Welcome to the Visual Studio Gallery

Visual Studio Gallery tips

You can access the site via http://visualstudiogallery.com/, or the shorter friendly redirect http://vsgallery.com/.

Anthony Cangialosi, program manager on our VS Ecosystem team who is responsible for the Visual Studio Gallery site, has started blogging again with information and news about the new site. Recently posted on Anthony's blog was: Seeing all the VS Gallery Extensions

Just thought I would share a useful tip for the Gallery. You may find that you want to see more than the top 10 newest items or the 10 most viewed items. We'll be adding a more link to the bottom of those in the near future but in the mean time you can see this by using a trick in the search bar.

Enter a space (the actual character space with the space bar) into the search control in the upper right corner of the gallery. Then press the search button. You'll get back a list of all the extensions since all extensions will have a description with a space in it. Now sort this list by the column you are interested in, modified date, number of views, cost category, etc.

If you use the tip above and search the Visual Studio Gallery with just a single space character, you'll see we just passed 500 items listed this week, which means we are averaging about 100 new items listed on the site per week.

VSX Developer Center updated

The Visual Studio Extensibility Developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx was updated recently with a new interface similar to the one found on the VB and C# dev centers, and others. The site now has its own stand-alone center with independent navigation pages on VSX via the tabbed navigation (Library, Learn, Downloads, Support, Community). There will be additional enhancements to the site soon along with upcoming new VSX content like whitepapers, videos, samples, and more.

VSX on Channel 9

Late last month we had two videos posted on Channel 9, both interviews by Dan Fernandez:

Channel 9: Anthony Cangialosi and Ken Levy: Visual Studio Gallery

I catch up with Anthony Cangialosi and Ken Levy from the Visual Studio Extensibility team to talk about the newly launched site for finding Visual Studio extensions, www.visualstudiogallery.com. You'll also see Ken walk through using two cool, free extensions that you can download from the gallery, StickyNotes and the Source Code Outliner PowerToy.

Channel 9: Ken Levy and Aaron Marten: Visual Studio 2008 Extensibility

Ken and Aaron talk about the new features for extensibility in Visual Studio 2008 and the Visual Studio 2008 SDK including touching on key topics like:
- How you can build your own IDE with the Visual Studio Shell
- How you could create your own language service using Babel
- How to plug into editor features like IntelliSense for statement completion
- How to build your own "Hello World" tool Window

New "How Do I?" Videos for Visual Studio Extensibility

There are many new How Do I videos on VSX published, and you can subscribe to the "RSS feed for "How Do I?" videos for VS and VSX. These are great videos created by VSX developers Hilton Giesenow and Dylan Miles.

New articles on LearnVSXNow!

István Novák continues his awesome series of VSX related educational content he calls LearnVSXNow!, now with 15 VSX technical articles posted with more great educational content on the way.

DreamSpark provides Microsoft developers tools to students for free

The new Microsoft DreamSpark combined with our free Visual Studio SDK opens the door for many students to learn, use, and extend Visual Studio for free. Some additional comments from our team in Aaron Marten's blog: FREE Visual Studio 2008 for College Students via DreamSpark.

Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008

If you have created packages using the VS SDK for VS SDK 2005 and have or plan to start using the VS SDK for VS 2008, check out James Lau's blog post: Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008: A more Advanced Guide.

VSX at events

Earlier this week, Quan To and I spoke at the local .NET Developers Association user group on VSX: Extend Your Visual Studio Development Experience. The session lasted over an hour and a half we counted 59 attendees total. Quan showed how create a simple source code outliner extensions using the VS SDK. Quan has a link to the walkthrough steps for that demo and a short summary of our presentation in his blog post: VSX Talk at the .NET Developer Association weekly meeting.

If you plan to give a VSX related presentation at a conference or user group, feel free to let me know in advance so that I might mention here on the VSX team blog to help increase awareness.

VS extension tips of the month

We posted a new PowerToy called PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008, and it's already the #1 most viewed listing on the Visual Studio Gallery and the #1 download on MSDN Code Gallery (not including documentation downloads). If you downloaded the PowerCommands readme prior today, you may want to check out the updated version of the readme on the download page. The new PowerCommands utility along with Source Outliner PowerToy is a Visual Studio 2008 and StickyNotes, all ranked as the top 3 most viewed listings on the Visual Studio as of today, all make great complementary free VS IDE productivity tools.

As of today, the PowerCommands has over 5000 unique views on the Visual Studio Gallery and over 4000 downloads from MSDN Code Gallery. Feel free to post messages in the Discussions or Issue Tracker pages of the Code Gallery page to provide feedback for possible updates and future versions of PowerCommands.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more news from the team, additional VSX content online, and additional information about our upcoming version of the VS SDK for VS 2008.

Please send your feedback to us via the Contact link on any of our team member blogs, or post a technical question in the MSDN Forum for VSX. You can also email me directly at klevy@microsoft.com or using the Email link on my blog.

Ken Levy
Program Manager
Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy
http://msdn.com/vsx

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 released

vsxteam — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:02:00 GMT

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 is now available for free download, along with source code and a readme document. PowerCommands, is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

The source code, which requires the VS SDK for VS 2008 installed, can be used to modify the exisitng PowerCommands functionality or to use as a reference sample for creating additional custom menu extensions.

PowerCommands is the type of extension for Visual Studio that contains additional command menu functions for the VS IDE that most VS developers would use regularly. Some of these cool menu commands are being considered for new IDE features in the next version of Visual Studio. PowerCommands makes a great complementary PowerToy utility to both StickyNotes and the Source Code Outliner PowerToy.

Below is a list of the included in PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 version 1.0. Refer to the Readme document which includes many additional screenshots.

Collapse Projects
This command collapses a hierarchy in the solution explorer starting from the root selected node. It can be executed from three different places: solution, solution folders and project nodes respectively.

Copy Class
This command copies a selected class entire content to the clipboard. It can be executed from a single project item or a project item with dependent sub items.

Paste Class
This command pastes a class entire content from the clipboard. It can be executed from a project or folder node.

Copy References
This command copies a reference or set of references to the clipboard. It can be executed from the references node, a single reference node or set of reference nodes.

Paste References
This command pastes a reference or set of references from the clipboard. It can be executed from different places depending on the type of project. For CSharp projects it can be executed from the references node. For Visual Basic and Website projects it can be executed from the project node.

Copy As Project Reference
This command copies a project as a project reference to the clipboard. It can be executed from a project node.

Edit Project File
This command opens the MSBuild project file for a selected project inside Visual Studio. It can be executed from a project node.

Open Containing Folder
This command opens a Windows Explorer window pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from a project item node

Open Command Prompt
This command opens a Visual Studio command prompt pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from four different places: solution, project, folder and project item nodes respectively.

Unload Projects
This command unloads all projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node.

Reload Projects
This command reloads all unloaded projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node.

Remove and Sort Usings
This command removes and sort using statements for all classes given a project. It can be executed from a solution node or a single project node.
Note: The Remove and Sort Usings feature is only available for C# projects since the C# editor implements this feature as a command in the C# editor (which this command calls for each .cs file in the project). The Visual Basic IDE implements this functionality for Imports in an interactive way: Project properties, go to the References tab, then click the Unused References... button, then select which references you want removed via a listbox.

Extract Constant
This command creates a constant definition statement for a selected text. It can be executed from the code window over a selected text.

Clear Recent File List
This command clears the Visual Studio recent file list.

Clear Recent Project List
This command clears the Visual Studio recent project list.

Transform Templates
This command executes the associated custom tool with text templates items. It can be executed from a DSL project node or a folder node.

Close All
This command closes all documents. It can be executed from a document tab.