VSX Team Blog : VS SDK

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 SDK are available on the download center!

vsxteam — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:30:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 bits went live this morning for everyone!

You can get access to all our Beta 2 products from the following website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

The SDK is also available from that location. Start using it and we're looking forward to seeing your extensions on the Visual Studio Gallery.

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 2 Readme

vsxteam — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:09:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 2 Supplemental Readme

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Documentation is available here.

The DSL Tools for Beta 2 is available here.

This posting contains additional readme and known issues about the Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 2 release. These are in addition to the known issues that were included in the installation of the Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 2.

ISSUE: Building a project that generates a VSIX file fails when including a large file in the project.

WORK AROUND: This happens when a file greater than 10 MB is added to the project and marked to be included in the VSIX. To work around the issue, build your solution using MSBuild from the commandline. This issue will be fixed in the release after Beta 2.

ISSUE: Creation of a Custom Editor with uppercase unicode letters in the project name fails.

WORK AROUND: To work around this issue, avoid using only uppercase unicode letter in the project name.

ISSUE: Isolated shell projects display unnecessary item templates without an icon.

WORK AROUND: There is no work around to this issue. The item templates are benign and do not affect the Isolated Shell.

ISSUE: Deleting Project or Item templates through the Manifest Editor does not remove the template from the VSIX output.

WORK AROUND: To work around this issue, manually remove the template zip file in your project when removing the Project or Item template through the manifest editor.

ISSUE: The copy build task in the VSSDK.targets file copies the project or item templates to the Local Application Data location instead of the bin/debug folder.

WORK AROUND: If the desired output location is the bin/debug folder and not the Local Application Data folder, follow these steps:

1. Disable copying to Local Application Folder by updating the project file:

<DeployVSTemplates>false</DeployVSTemplates>

2. To enable copying to bin/debug, add the following to the project file:

<CreateVsixContainerDependsOn>$(CreateVsixContainerDependsOn);GetMyTemplates</CreateVsixContainerDependsOn>

</PropertyGroup>

<VSIXSubPath>SharePoint\2010\1033\</VSIXSubPath>

</VSIXSourceItem>

</ItemGroup>

</Target>

ISSUE: Unable to add a reference to your existing VSIX project through the manifest designer.

WORK AROUND: This issue occurs when a developer tries to add a new assembly to their VSIX project and uses the manifest designer to reference the same project. To work around this, add the new assembly in a separate project and reference that through the manifest editor. This issue will be fixed in the first release after Beta 2.

ISSUE: Unable to use Createpkgdef to generate a pkgdef file from registration attributes.

WORK AROUND: When using registration attributes in your code to auto generate a pkgdef file, you will need to add the registration attribute code found in the MPF Sources in your VS SDK install. The source can be found in the VS SDK installation folder under VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Source\CSharp\RegistrationAttributes.

ISSUE: Unable to edit a xaml file.

WORK AROUND: The reference assemblies installed by the Visual Studio SDK are a slimmed down version of the full reference assemblies. When editing a xaml file, this mismatch may cause the editor to not allow users to edit their files xaml files inside of VS.

To workaround this issue, copy the reference assemblies that your project requires into the Global Assembly Cache.

ISSUE: UI DLLs do not get copied to the correct folder for C++ projects.

WORK AROUND: When building a C++ project (including the Visual Studio Isolated Shell), the UI DLL does not get copied to the locale specific folder (such as \1033). This causes the menu items of the packages to now appear in the Visual Studio IDE.

To workaround this issue, manually copy and deploy your UI.DLL into the locale specific folder.

ISSUE: Visual Studio 10 Beta 2 may fail to load some MEF assemblies that are installed as part of a VSIX. This issue affects MEF assemblies defining new types that are used in MEF metadata. For example, an extension defining its custom text tag derived from the Visual Studio 2010 Editor's TextMarkerTag type.

WORK AROUND: Create a .pkgdef file and place it in the same folder where the MEF assembly is located. Add the following two lines to the pkgdef file and replace the {GUID} part with any unique GUID. Then restart Visual Studio.

[$RootKey$\BindingPaths\{guid}]

"$PackageFolder$"=""

How do I convert my Beta 1 VSIX manifest to Beta 2?

vsxteam — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:57:00 GMT

We received a lot of feedback from the community and other developers about the Extension Manager VSIX manifest and made some changes in Beta 2. Some of the changes included:

Making the schema less strict so elements don't need to be in a particular order
Following XML standard casing
Clearing up ambiguity about supported VS editions and products since the manifest works for isolated shell applications as well
Adding support for per machine installations (remember, per user installs are still preferred and a better user experience for customers getting your extension)
Adding version info for the VSIX manifest
and lots of little changes to make things easier and better.

Ofcourse, these changes will require you to update your Beta 1 manifest files. Instead of manually tweaking your XML, we've built a nifty cool VSIX Manifest Converter tool to help you move your Beta 1 manifest to Beta 2.

The tool is attached to this blog post. To use it, just run the exe in the directory where your VSIX or extension.vsixmanifest file is. The tool will automatically convert the manifest. If you have a VSIX, it'll crack open the VSIX, update the manifest and repackage your VSIX.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK Documentation is now available!

vsxteam — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:46:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK documentation just got released! You can access it from here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb166441(VS.100).aspx

There's still a lot more to cover but this set of docs will get you started with what's changed in VS 2010. The team will also continue to blog on this site and our own personal blogs about other cool extensibility features so keep an eye out for that.

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.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK Beta1 is now available!

vsxteam — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:16:00 GMT

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK Beta1 has just shipped and is available for download!

If you're interested in Domain Specific Languages and want to use tools to build your own DSLs, download it and try it out. You will need the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 bits and the Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta1 installed first.

The DSL team also launched their code gallery site which contains more information and samples to get you started with DSLs.

Visual Studio 2010 CTP is available!

vsxteam — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:38:00 GMT

We unveiled a glimpse of the Visual Studio 2010 new features at the Professional Developer's Conference last week. If you were unable to attend, you can download the Visual Studio 2010 Customer Technology Preview from here. The CTP is quite big, it's 7 Gigabytes and includes Team Foundation Server features as well as Visual Studio 10 and the Visual Studio 10 SDK.

After installing the CTP, take a look at the Walkthrough document (How to use Visual Studio 2010 CTP.docx). The document contains the walkthroughs of the currently working features inside Visual Studio and will give you a first hand view of some of the new and exciting things in the next Visual Studio release.

In addition to the walk throughs, we've provided several samples for extending the new Editor. The Editor itself is built on top of the new Managed Extensibility Framework. We will continue providing more samples in the coming weeks to help you learn more about the new Editor and the extensibility points available.

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK is also buried in the documents folder under c:\Users\public\documents\CTPWalkthroughs\Visual Studio\SDK. It is a bare bones SDK mainly for supporting the Editor walkthroughs. We are still working on our plans for the Visual Studio 2010 SDK and have only shipped minimal pieces in the SDK. We will have a fully functional SDK at our next release.

When you first launch Visual Studio, the first thing you'll notice is our new Start Page. The start page is clean, not as cluttered as the old one, and provides a great starting point to create projects, load existing projects, launch the walkthrough, or send feedback. We've kept the RSS feeds but have toned it down and it appears as a rotating banner on the bottom of the start page.

In the coming weeks, we'll continue to blog more about Visual Studio 10 and the Visual Studio 10 SDK.

Stay tuned. :)

-Quan

Conference Videos, PDC, and Tech Ed

vsxteam — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:58:00 GMT

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for the delay but the videos from our VSX Developer Conference last month are now up on Channel 9! The session list has direct links to the talk so for those who missed our conference or want to take a second look at the talks, check them out. Huge thanks to Anthony for taking the time to get them uploaded.

For those going to the PDC, make sure you check out our Dev Manager, Tim Wagner's talk on the Visual Studio Platform. Tim will also be presenting at Tech Ed EMEA in Barcelona in November so if you're going to either conference, I highly encourage you to attend and learn more about what we're doing with Visual Studio Extensibility.

We will also have a Visual Studio Platform/Extensibility booth at the PDC. Nathan Halstead, one of our Program Managers on the extensibility and platform team will be there to answer questions and help you understand more about extending VS.

Enjoy the videos and hopefully you'll be able to chat with Tim or Nathan at the PDC or Tech Ed.

-Quan

Thanks for an amazing conference!

vsxteam — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:05:00 GMT

On behalf of the Visual Studio Extensibility team, we want to thank everyone for attending our Visual Studio Extensibility Developer conference. It was an amazing week which went off without a hitch due to a ton of planning and coordination by Anthony, Heather, Jamie, Laura and the rest of our marketing team.

Some of the highlights include:

325 attendees including our youngest VSX developer. He's so young he's still years away from a driver's license :)
125 different companies in attendance
44 sessions with 5 speakers from the community
60 formal 1:1 meetings between Microsoft and the partners
A great partner dinner at the Olympic Sculpture Garden in Seattle
A pizza and segway night for partners

On top of that, we even had three Microsoft executives denied our wonderful cookies in between sessions.

We received a lot of great feedback after the conference and hope that all of you left jazzed about extending Visual Studio!

The slide decks for the sessions on the first two days which were open to the public are posted on the conference sessions link. All the sessions were also recorded and we'll try make those available as soon as possible.

If you have any feedback on how to make the conference even better next year, please fill out your surveys or post a message on this blog.

Thanks for a great week!

Quan

VSX Conference next week, VSX on Code Gallery Update...

vsxteam — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:56:31 GMT

We are less than a week away from the VSX Developer Conference. We are all geared up for it and we will have a great conference. Ken Levy just made a post on his blog this morning about 10 Reasons to attend the VSX DevCon 2008. If you have any colleagues and friends who may be interested, they can still register on the site to attend. Session details can be found here.

Did you know that we have a VSX home on MSDN Code Gallery? I am talking about Code Gallery, not Visual Studio Gallery. Code Gallery is Microsoft's site for anyone in the community to post sample code, help documentation and small binaries. We have just updated the our VSX home there to better layout all the available resources.

With this update, we have also included some deep dive documentation that we have been working on. Each deep dive document walks through a SDK sample or a shared source project. You can find the list at the bottom of our VSX Home on Code Gallery. We will be adding more as we go.

Moving forward, we are also looking to ship more and more samples online. The idea is that we won't have to gate new sample release or sample updates on actual VS SDK releases. You can expect future VS SDK releases to contain more tooling support to make extending Visual Studio easier. But for the actual samples, you will be able to get them online.

That's it for now. If you are coming to the VSX DevCon next week, we look forward to meeting you.

Cheers,

James Lau
Lead Program Manager, VSX Team

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 has been released!

vsxteam — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:35:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 has been released! Woo hoo!!!

We've been spending a lot of time the last few months getting this out the door so we're all pretty excited about this release.

The Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 compliments the Service Pack 1 release of Visual Studio 2008. The SDK contains several new features such as:

· Significant size reduction for Visual Studio Shell redistributable packages. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables are now approximately 150 megabytes smaller. The redistributables no longer carry the full .NET Framework 3.5 payload. However, they contain a bootstrapper that automatically downloads the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime if it is not installed on the target computer.

· Support for progress feedback in a chained installation. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables can now pass installation progress back to the chaining process. This lets developers display accurate progress in their setup programs.

· Visual Studio Shell development now supports normal user. Developing and deploying a Visual Studio 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.

· DSL Print Preview. The ability to preview a DSL before printing has been added to the DSL designer.

· New XML Tree Editor sample. The SQL Server team has provided a new XML Tree Editor sample. The earlier sample has been removed.

· New TFS Samples. Two new TFS samples have been added.

o VSExtensibilitySample

o This new TFS sample provides an example of creating a Visual Studio add-in that interacts with the Version Control user interface of Team Explorer. The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of such an add-in.

o RichClientCustomControl

o This new TFS sample provides an example of creating Work Item Tracking custom controls that work within Team Explorer. The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of custom controls as well as a separate document that describes how to write custom controls that can be used within the Team Server Web Access environment .

· Updated Shell documentation. Documentation about the Shell has been added.

In order to use the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1, you will need to install Visual Studio Service Pack 1. The Visual Studio Service Pack is available here.

Once you have Service Pack 1 installed, you can download the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 from here.

If you run into any issues, check out our online readme here.

Please download the SDK and try it out.

Also, if you haven't already, sign up for our Dev conference coming up in September!

-Quan

What Have We Been Up to?

vsxteam — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:06:02 GMT

Our team has been busy working on several things in parallel. I wanted to blog a little bit about the stuff we have been working on so our VSX developer community is in the know :)

1) VS 2008 SP1. You all have see the beta go out, and hopefully have already downloaded and tried it. As we have announced earlier, we have made some pretty significant changes in the VS Shell redistributable packages, reducing the size of the overall redistributable package. Since the Beta has been out for a while, you can expect the RTM version of SP1 to be released soon (soon is subject to interpretation).

2) VS 2008 SDK 1.1. We have gotten in the good habit of releasing a matching SDK for each public release of Visual Studio. Earlier on when SP1 Beta was released, we released the matching VS 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta. Well, obviously, we are going to have a RTM release of VS 2008 SDK 1.1 to match SP1 RTM! The 1.1 release is mostly bug fixes, but we have also added a few enhancements.

Significant reduction in size for Visual Studio Shell redistributable packages. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables are now approximately 150 megabytes smaller. The redistributables no longer carry the full .NET Framework 3.5 payload. However, they contain a bootstrapper that automatically downloads the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime if it is not installed on the target computer.
Support for progress feedback in a chained installation. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables can now pass installation progress back to the chaining process. This lets developers display accurate progress in their setup programs.
Visual Studio Shell development now supports normal user. Developing and deploying a Visual Studio 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.
New XML Tree Editor sample has been added.
Addition documentation about the shell has been added.
Added new DSL Designer Print Preview feature.
DSL nested shape routing support

We will release VS 2008 SDK 1.1 RTM shortly after VS 2008 SP1 RTM is released.

3) Future VS SDK (Next Preview Release). I can't disclose anything specific here, but we are also starting to work on the version of VS SDK for the next version of Visual Studio. The idea is to continue our good habit of releasing a VS SDK for each publicly released version of Visual Studio (including preview versions).

4) Future VS version. Yes, we are working on more than just the SDK. Our team is also working on some features in the next version of Visual Studio. Unfortunately, it's too early to disclose this to the community right now, but we will let you know once we are ready to share them more broadly.

5) VSX Developer Conference. Our team has also been busy organizing the upcoming developer conference. We are very excited about this upcoming conference as this is the first of its kind. I have also posted about the session details last week. We have a very exciting agenda lined up and we would love to see you all there. If you haven't registered yet, there is still space so you should register right away!

6) TechEd SEA. Good o' Gareth is in Kuala Lumpur this week, giving 3 sessions about VSX at TechEd SEA 2008. If you are there, make sure you say hi to him!

7) VSX Survey . Some of you have *very kindly* took part in the VSX survey that we posted from May to July. We have also been looking at the results, and we have gained some great insights. When we are ready, we will share those results with you.

If you have any thoughts on the things that we are working on, feel free to leave comments below.

Just for fun, here is a picture we took this morning. Mariano (a developer on our team) made some AWESOME Pavé (pronounced Pa-vey) and brought it at our scrum meeting this morning. It's a Brazilian dessert, and it's *very* good. Mariano is the one cutting it. You can see Aaron, Don and Carl in the background.

cheers,

James Lau
Lead Program Manager, VSX Team

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

Generate Load Keys form on VSX dev center

vsxteam — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:15:27 GMT

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 Developer Center site for a more simple, quick, and easy process of obtaining PLKs and SLKs.

Below is a link to the new page (and there are links to it on the http://msdn.com/vsx home page). Copied below the link is the description of PLKs and SLKs.

Generate Load Keys

Package Load Keys (PLK) and Shell Load Keys (SLK) are required for your VSPackages and Visual Studio Shell applications to load successfully. The form below allows you generate the PLK or SLK needed for your VSPackages and Visual Studio Shell applications to load successfully. If you agree to the terms defined in the Visual Studio SDK you used to develop your Visual Studio Package or Visual Studio Shell application, then you can use this form to generate the appropriate load key.

Package Load Keys (PLK)

To prevent unauthenticated VSPackages from running in Visual Studio, each VSPackage to be loaded in a deployed application must have a valid PLK. The Visual Studio SDK provides a Developer Load Key (DLK) that makes it possible for VSPackages to load without a PLK during development.

Shell Load Keys (SLK)

Each isolated Visual Studio Shell based application to be deployed must have a valid SLK. The SLK is uniquely related to the application and cannot be used to open any other application.

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!