VSX Team Blog : VS Shell

Russian Integrated and Isolated Shells for Visual Studio 2008

vsxteam — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:44:00 GMT

The localization team in Visual Studio have been hard at work adding a new localized language to the suite of languages that Visual Studio Supports. I'm proud to annouce that the Russian edition of Visual Studio has just been released which includes a Russian Integrated Shell and Russian Isolated Shell.

Prior to Russian, we supported 9 languages:

English
French
German
Italian
Spanish
Korean
Japanese
Chinese Simplified
Chinese Traditional

In additional to just the shells, we also shipped all the other Visual Studio products including the .NET Framework language packs in Russian. If you want to try out the trial edition, check out the links to the other Visual Studio editions here.

Have fun writing code with a Russian Visual Studio editor :)

-Quan

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 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

IronPython Studio 1.0 for Isolated and Integrated VS Shell

vsxteam — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:12:32 GMT

There is now an integrated VS Shell version of IronPython Studio free for download and installation to go along with isolated version. The version has also changed from CTP mode to version 1.0. Applications using the isolated version of the VS Shell runtime allow the application to be installed and run if there is no version of VS installed, and will still run stand-alone when there is a version of VS installed. Integrated applications for the VS Shell, like the new additional version of IronPython Studio, allow the application to run stand-alone with there is no version of VS installed, but run side by side within VS when a copy of VS installed before or after.

So the developer who would probably want to install the isolated version of IronPython Studio does not have VS and does not plan to install VS or wants it to run stand-alone independent of VS. The developer who would prefer the new integrated version of IronPython Studio has VS installed or plans to install VS and wants IronPython to run side by side within their installation of VS rather than as a stand-alone shell application.

For more information about the VS Shell, visit the http://msdn.com/vsx developer center. For more information about IronPython Studio, check out the CodePlex page it is hosted on and the previous blog post here: IronPython Studio for VS 2008 Shell released

IronPython Studio is now available as free download. Working with the VSX team at Microsoft, Pablo Galiano of Clarius Consulting released IronPython Studio for developing Python applications. The free VS SDK includes a sample application called IronPython, a full integration of the IronPython language, IntelliSense, compiler, debugging, etc. integrated into Visual Studio. While the IronPython sample application is free within the VS SDK, the VS SDK does require VS Standard or above. This new IronPython Studio download is free and does not require any version of Visual Studio to install, it only requires the free VS 2008 Shell (isolated mode) runtime installation as well as the 1MB IronPython Setup installation. There are screenshots on the CodePlex project home page, and Pablo also created a IronPython Studio screencast video demo.

VSX FAQ Blog created for scenario based resource references

vsxteam — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:33:46 GMT

We just created a new VSX related blog called the VSX FAQ blog.

We will be posting new entries and updating existing ones on the VSX FAQ blog as needed. We have over 100 VSX FAQ topics with links already created and currently being reviewed, so expect to find many more entries posted over the upcoming weeks.

From the introduction blog post Welcome to the VSX FAQ blog:

Welcome to the VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility) FAQ (frequently asked questions) blog, a related resource to the VSX Team blog and the VSX Developer Center.

This blog is based on the concept of using a blog (including it's RSS feed) to host a scenario based technical FAQ listing with the answers being simply links to various online resources. You can subscribe to the VSX FAQ blog RSS feed, search this blog, and filter on various topic categories.

Existing VSX FAQ blog entries will be updated as needed when new related resources are added or discovered online for relative topics. Subscribing to the RSS feed will not only assist in discovering new FAQ entries, but will also be a way of being alerted when existing FAQs have links for additional related resources.

VSX developers should feel free to post comments to any of the VSX FAQ blog entries to recommend when additional resource links should be added, or when there are issues with any of the existing links. Another option to submit feedback is to click on the Email link on this blog's home page to send an email message directly to Ken Levy (who maintains this blog).

For additional educational content around VSX, check out the VSXUE Team blog. The VSX UE (User Education) team is also known as the Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem Documentation team at Microsoft. Topics on the VSXUE Team blog are generally topic previews, walkthroughs, tutorials, and late-breaking documentation to supplement new releases of the Visual Studio SDK and the VSX community.

For technical questions to any VSX FAQ blog posts or for VSX technical questions in general, visit the VSX Forum. The VSX Forum discussions include the Visual Studio SDK, extending VS using DSL Tools, add-ins, and macros.

Visit the Visual Studio Gallery to browse a showcase of free extensions and commercial products to enhance your development experience with Visual Studio.

For additional information, resources, news, and documentation related to Visual Studio extensibility including the Visual Studio SDK, visit http://msdn.com/vsx.

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

VSX Community Letter for February 2008

vsxteam — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:45:00 GMT

Below is a list of our various team member blogs, and also check out Terry Clancy's blog focused on VSIP and VSTS related topics.

VSX Webcasts online

We have three new VSX related MSDN webcasts now online from the VSX team, see VSX webcasts available on demand: VSX, VS Shell, and DSL Tools. You can watch online or download the video, each are about one hour long.

We have also posted many full webcasts from presentations from our team at recent events including our VSIP Summit conference and TechEd Europe a few months ago. We will have a formal place for these video downloads on the msdn.com/vsx developer center later this month when we launch our new and improved VSX developer center. Note: You can launch these files by clicking on the link or right click on the link and select Save Target As... to download the WMV file locally.

Build_IDE_With_VSShell_Webcast.wmv with James Lau (56 minutes, 20MB)
Deploying_VSX_Projects_Webcast.wmv with Aaron Marten (40 minutes, 276MB)
DSL_Tools_Webcast.wmv with Stuart Kent (76 minutes, 29MB)
Extending_DSLs_Webcast.wmv with Gareth Jones (55 minutes, 482MB)
Package_Testing_Framework_Webcast.wmv with Ole Preisler (60 minutes, 76MB)
Sandcastle_Webcast.wmv with David Wright (49 minutes, 62MB)
VS2008_SDK_Webcast.wmv with Deepankar Dubey (47 minutes, 59MB)
VSX_Architecture_Webcast.wmv with Doug Hodges (96 minutes, 122MB)

VSX at events

In January, some of our team members (Anthony Cangialosi, Quan To, and I) presented a VSX session at the Seattle Code Camp on January 26-27 in Redmond, WA. Much of the content in that session is in the various VSX webcasts recently posted online in slides and videos, and we plan to post additional screencast and webcast demos in the near future.

Earlier this week we hosted one of our VSIP Clinic events with many of our VSIP partners visiting here in Redmond. You can find more information about various VSIP events at VSIP Program Benefits.

We will be presenting a VSX session on Monday March 10th at the Seattle .NET User group, part of the .NET Developer Association, which meets in Redmond, WA on the Microsoft main campus in building 40.

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.

Upcoming Visual Studio Extensibility book

There’s a cool new book to release in March, Visual Studio Extensibility book from Wrox by author Keyvan Nayyeri. It is also available via amazon.com.

Determined to make the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) learning process as smooth as possible, this helpful resource shows you how to use VSX in order to facilitate easier development of Microsoft programming languages and development technologies. Keyvan Nayyeri examines how VSX simplifies the processes of coding, compilation, deployment, debugging, and testing. Plus, numerous examples, sample code, and real-world case studies demonstrate the various extensibility options of VSX so that you can perform routine tasks easier and quicker.

VS extension tips of the month

An updated version of Source Code Outliner PowerToy for Visual Studio 2008 is now available for free download as a great extension for Visual Studio 2008 (Standard versions and above). There is an MSI binary install download and the source code is available on CodePlex, now with Visual Basic source code as well as in C#.

Check out StickyNotes available for Visual Studio 2008 on new MSDN Code Gallery. With StickyNotes, you can save notes associated with a particular project for reminders as bugs to fix, features to add, areas to test, etc.

MSDN Code Gallery

In case you missed the announcement early this week, check out Soma's blog post MSDN Code Gallery - snippets, samples and resources about the new MSDN Code Gallery at http://code.msdn.com.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more team news, VSX content online, and more information about our upcoming next release 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

Known Issues for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0

vsxteam — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:04:00 GMT

Updated: Section 1.15 added on April 8th, 2008.

Here are many of the known issues in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0.

1. Known Issues

1.1 Run as Normal User is not supported for Visual Studio Shell development

If you are developing a Visual Studio Shell (isolated mode) project, you must log on as an administrator or, if you are running Windows Vista, you must run Visual Studio as an administrator. Running as normal user currently does not work correctly if you are developing a Visual Studio Shell (isolated mode) project.

1.2 Windows Installers (MSIs) that are produced by domain-specific language (DSL) Setup projects must be run from an elevated process in Windows Vista

A Windows Installer program that is produced by a DSL Setup project must be run from an administrator-elevated command prompt under Windows Vista, or as an administrator under Windows XP. If it is not, the installer will display a warning message and then terminate. Under Windows Vista, it is not possible to run the installer by double-clicking the installer and then elevating the installer program permissions. You can work around this by wrapping the installer program in your own setup program. The DSL will then be installed correctly when you run the setup as an administrator.

1.3 Issue with path editor in DSL Designer when editing Element Merge Directives

It is not possible to use the new path editor to edit link creation paths in element merge directives. If you do use the path editor, then you’ll get a validation error on the path. The workaround is to enter a correct path directly as text, which is still supported.

1.4 Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.8.0.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.8.0.dll from the Visual Studio 2005 SDK requires needs to be updated

If you are installing the Visual Studio 2008 SDK on a computer that has the Visual Studio 2005 SDK installed, you should update the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.8.0.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.8.0.dll in the VS2005 SDK. Some changes were made to this file during the Visual Studio 2008 time frame and to benefit from these changes, you will have to manually update this file. To do so, copy the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.8.0.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.8.0.dll from:

\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK\VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Assemblies\
and overwrite the copy under
\Program Files\Visual Studio 2005 SDK\2007.02\VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Assemblies\

If these assemblies are not updated, some warnings may be displayed when building packages that reference this dll. They would look like:

Reference to type 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.IOleMenuCommand' claims it is defined in ‘\Program Files\Visual Studio 2005 SDK\2007.02\VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Assemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.8.0.dll', but it could not be found

1.5 Event handling generation in the IronPython Sample

Because IronPython is a dynamic language, event handling generation is not implemented like it is in static languages such as C#. The primary problem is that the IronPython compiler does not produce strongly typed assemblies. Therefore, for WPF, static-language-like event handling creation cannot be illustrated at compile time. Instead, custom event handling is implemented by wiring the event handling code to the compiled XAML.

For the WPF designer to instantiate a custom EventBindingProvider, the type (for example, PythonEventBindingProvider) must be on a path in the registered .NET AssemblyFolders. As a post-build step, PythonProject.csproj registers its output folder as an AssemblyFolder to meet this requirement.

1.6 IronPython/WPF CodeDom registration issue

When you build an IronPython WPF application, you may receive the following error message: “Unknown build error, 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object'”. For XAML compilation to succeed, a valid CodeDomProvider for the language being compiled must be registered on the computer. Because this is a global machine configuration setting, the IronPython sample does not try to register the IronPython CodeDomProvider automatically. To register the IronPython CodeDomProvider manually and build IronPython/WPF projects by using Visual Studio or MSBuild, do the following things:

Open %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.config in a text editor (such as Notepad).
To register the IronPython CodeDomProvider, under the root <configuration> node add the following items:
<system.codedom>
<compilers>
<compiler language="py;IronPython" extension=".py" type="IronPython.CodeDom.PythonProvider, IronPython, Version=1.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4afbdc4d950a9602" />
</compilers>
</system.codedom>
Close and save machine.config

1.7 Use of DSL Tools may require experimental hive reset

If you are not the user who installed the Visual Studio SDK, you will not have an experimental hive under HKCU and you will not be able to use the DSL Tools successfully until you create one. The designer creation wizard warns you about this when it unfolds a new solution. The workaround is to reset the experimental hive by using the command that is installed on the Start menu.

1.8 C# Example.VSIDEHostAdapter unit test does not work

The C# Example.VSIDEHostAdapter sample unit test project is not yet functional.

1.9 Some unit tests fail

The following samples have some failing unit tests:

C# Reference.ComboBox
C# Example.NestedProject
C# Example.SccProvider

1.10 The DSL diagram layout is incorrect after undoing the "Bring Tree Here" command

While creating a new Task Flow designer, clicking on "Bring Tree Here", and then selecting Undo results in the diagram layout displaying overlapping elements. The workaround is to collapse and expand inheritance and relationships twice for Flow element shapes.

1.10 TypeConverters and TypeDescriptors are not picked up during the build process or during toolbox initialization.

When adding a custom TypeConverter or TypeDescriptor and then building the DSL, the TypeConvertor or TypeDescriptor is not picked up. The workaround is to rebuild the solution with a clean build.

1.11 Error when new project names exceed 28 characters

When creating a new project using a name that exceeds 28 characters, the project works properly until "devenv.exe /setup" or "devenv.exe /remove" is called during installation, repair, or uninstalling the package. To prevent an error from occurring, all project names should contain 28 characters or less.

1.12 Error when new creating a new VS Shell project without Visual C++ installed

When creating a new VS Shell project, Visual C++ must be installed. Without it on the machine, you will get an error at project creation. To workaround this, launch Visual Studio from Add/Remove programs and add the Visual C++ feature.

1.13 Overriding the Invoke member of OleMenuCommand causes a crash

When inheriting from OleMenuCommand, overriding the wrong Invoke method will cause a crash. If Invoke(object, IntPtr) is overridden, the crash will occur. To work around this, override the Invoke(object, IntPtr, OLECMDEXECOPT) function since that is the one called by the current implementation of OleMenuCommandService.

1.14 Error in the Task List does not navigate to the right line of code.

When creating a custom CodeDom parser, double clicking on an error in the task list brings the customer one line too high in the code file. This is a bug in the TaskProvider.Navigate function. To work around this, you need to prevent the VSDesignSurface from accessing its TaskProvider. Follow these steps to fix this issue:

Call GetService(typeof(IDesignerHost)) on the designer loader
Call GetService(typeof(DesignSurface)) on the designer host

Once you have the design surface, follow the steps below and subscribe to the DesignSurface.Loaded event. You will need to do tis once for each design surface that is created.

Call the design surface's GetService method with typeof(IServiceContainer)
On the service container that gets returned, call RemoveService(typeof(TaskProvider))

If you are converting from a Visual Studio 2005 extension to a Visual Studio 2008 extension, you may also need to use the fully qualified type name for the 9.0 TaskProvider.

The fully qualified name is

Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.TaskProvider, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.9.0, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a

The code will look like:

System.Type providerTypeV9 = System.Type.GetType("Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.TaskProvider, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.9.0, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a");

if (providerTypeV9 != null)

{

RemoveService(providerTypeV9);

}

1.15 The DesignTimeRun switch documentation does not appear when devenv.exe /? is invoked

When invoking devenv.exe /?, the help documentation for the DesignTimeRun switch is missing. This switch should be used as a startup argument to all experimental hive instances of the DSL designer that invoke the target designer.

When the DesignTimeRun switch is provided to devenv.exe at startup, it deletes the toolbox cache and recreates it. This takes less time than using devenv /setup to reset the toolbox of the experimental hive.

Using this switch is highly recommended. Without it, the experimental hive toolbox may not be registered or updated correctly during design time, which can lead to corrupt entries.

This switch is not required during deployment of the target designer since a full deployment will run devenv.exe /setup at installation time, which correctly creates the toolbox cache.

2. Product Support

2.1 Latest How-To Information

For the latest documentation and how-to information about new features, including Visual Studio Shell development, visit the VSX team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam/ and the VSXUE team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxue/.

2.2 Getting Help

To get technical assistance from the community or the VSX product development team, use the following MSDN forums:

For integrated development environment (IDE) integration, see Visual Studio Extensibility.
To find the appropriate Visual Studio Team System forum for the extensibility area that you are working on, see Visual Studio Team System Forums.

VSX webcasts available on demand: VSX, VS Shell, and DSL Tools

vsxteam — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:34:00 GMT

The VSX team presented three MSDN webcasts last month that are now online. To view online or download any of the VSX webcasts, go to the link for the webcast below and sign in via Windows Live ID, enter your name, and then you will be able to view online or download the webcast.

VSX Community Letter for January 2008

vsxteam — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:16:00 GMT

This month's letter includes 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

The team has been busy (not counting the holidays) since we released Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Shell in late November. After our version 1.0 release, we plan on continuing to release subsequent releases of the VS SDK that targets VS 2008. Our current plan is to release the next VS 2008 SDK around April. The team is currently in full planning and development mode for VS Service Pack 1 as well as the next VS SDK. We see future versions of the VS SDK to include more productivity tools for extending VS (what we sometimes refer to as tools for building tools, or VSX Tools). The team is also going to continue to work on a more seamless development experience for creating VS Shell instances with the VS SDK, and as always we work on fixing various VS SDK bugs we find as well as those reported.

We have a new program manager on the VS Ecosystem team named Quan To. Check out Quan To's Blog. Quan is new to our team but not new to Microsoft. He will be working on the VS SDK releases. Quan's first blog post on VSX is How do I programmatically unload a project from a solution?. If you are in the Seattle area for Seattle Code Camp January 26-27, you will be able to meet Quan and many others on the VSX team during and after the VSX session on January 27th (see details in the VSX event section below).

Dr. eX, resident expert on anything to do with VSX, now posts here on the VSX team blog with a new tag: VSX Team Blog tagged Dr. eX. The archived Dr. eX Blog is still a useful reference to past technical pasts. Our VSX team blog web views and RSS feeds here has become ranked in the top 2% of all blogs on blogs.msdn.com, and we wanted more exposure for Dr. eX's blog posts as well as more technical content here on our team blog. Expect to see regular blog posts monthly from Dr. eX to add to the news and other information here. Check out Dr. eX's first blog post here: Dr. eX: How can I programmatically add a database connection to the server explorer toolwindow with my add-in?.

The team at Microsoft who works on the VS SDK documentation has created their own team blog for VSX documentation related topics. The VSX UE (User Education) team blog can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxue/, and there are some in depth blog posts there to start it off for developers getting started with the VS SDK as well as developing for the new VS 2008 Shell. For more details, refer to New VSXUE Team Blog from the VSX documentation team.

DSL Tools roadmap

Stuart Kent posted some details about our roadmap for DSL tools, check out DSL Tools beyond VS2008. For a great open source example of a DSL tools based project combined with our new free VS 2008 Shell runtime, check out the Storyboard Designer project on CodePlex including a screencast demo video (on the Releases tab page).

VSX team job openings

There is a lot of exciting activity going on at Microsoft around the future of extensibility for Visual Studio. We have many job openings on the VS Ecosystem team at Microsoft, both in Redmond, WA and in Cambridge, UK. For details, check out Gareth Jones' (our team's developer lead) blog post Hiring for DSL Tools and Visual Studio eXtensibility in both Cambridge and Redmond for the details.

VSX at events

In November, we had most of our team attend various developer events worldwide. Myself and a few others were at VS DevConnections Vegas in Las Vegas, while a good portion of our team was at TechEd Europe. James Lau, Aaron Marten, and I were at DevTeach Vancouver, and VSX was the topic of the keynote.

For a summary as well as slide + sample content from our VSX sessions at DevTeach, check out VSX keynote at DevTeach 2007 Vancouver summary and slides and VSX sessions at DevTeach 2007 Vancouver summary and slides.

VSX community member Alan Stevens spoke at a VSX session at DevLink in Nashville, TN and was interviewed, see Alan Stevens talks VSX on Channel 9 Code To Live.

For VSIP program members, we have a VSIP Developer Clinic next month here February 4-5 in Redmond, WA.

We have two VSX related sessions scheduled at the Seattle Code Camp on January 26-27 in Redmond, WA.

VSX: Extend Your Visual Studio Development Experience
Visual Studio provides a great set of development tools out of the box, and extending your platform with additional functionality brings you the benefits of the expanding VS ecosystem. Fasten your seat belt and get ready for a demo-centric roller coaster ride touring the end to end story around extending Visual Studio. From adding free or commercial extensions to VS, to building your own simple extensions for your own use, to distributing integrated packages to others for free, to creating a business or commercial product for VS developers, to innovating applications based on the new VS Shell royalty and license free. VSX, a shortcut name for Visual Studio Extensibility, represents the community which is a virtual and growing ecosystem that includes the VS SDK, all aspects of extending VS (packages, add-ins, macros, visualizers), .NET developers who extend VS, VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partner) program companies, and the VS SDK team (also known as the VSX team or the VS Tools Ecosystem team). This session will include many of the members from the Microsoft VSX team demonstrating various developer-centric demos (no slides) on extending VS with great free utilities as well as creating custom VS extensions.
Track: Core .NET
Speaker: Ken Levy
Sunday January 27th, 1:30pm-2:45pm
Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools
Domain-Specific Language Models are a powerful technique for embodying in a tool the abstractions specific to the software your business is building and guidance on how to use them with your own frameworks. In this session we’ll examine the domain-specific development pattern, see how to build a simple graphical language from scratch, how to make it domain-specific and finally how to add architectural guidance directly to the tool.
Track: Core .NET
Speaker: Gareth Jones

On Saturday evening January 26th from 6:30pm to whenever, there is a Seattle Code Camp Geek Dinner at the Crossroads Mall Food Court.

.NET Rocks! podcast: Ken Levy on Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX)

Audio podcast NET Rocks show #303: Ken Levy on Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) is now online.

Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell talk VSX with me. A good part of the new hour interview covers topics discussed in the VSX keynote from DevTeach Vancouver mentioned above.

If you don't already subscribe to .NET Rocks!, you can download an MP3 or WMA version of this audio podcast interview, both are 43MB files.

MSDN Webcast on VSX

We have several webcasts on MSDN on the topic of VSX in January. If you don't participate in the live webcast, the video and audio will be available on demand about a day after the event at MSDN On-Demand Webcasts and we will post a link to each VSX webcast online once they are available.

MSDN Webcast: VSX: Extend Your Development Experience with Visual Studio 2008 (Level 100) with Ken Levy
Monday, January 21, 2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
MSDN Webcast: Build Tools for Any Platform with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell (Level 300) with James Lau
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 10:00 AM Pacific Time
MSDN Webcast: Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL (Level 300) with Gareth Jones
Tuesday, January 29, 2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

More How-to videos for VSX online

As of today, we have to 22 videos on VSX at "How Do I?" Videos for Visual Studio Extensibility. If you have suggestions for future VSX topics, please let me know.

VSX team blogs

Here is an updated list of our various team member blogs (also listed on the VSX Team Blog home page here):

VS extension tips of the month

Check out SaphireSteel's new Ruby on Rails IDE based on VS 2008 Shell for the first commercial product based on the new VS 2008 Shell.

We are also three free open source applications online:

For some additional technical information on the VS 2008 Shell, check out some of Pablo Galiano's VS Shell recent blog posts and this VSX Forum post.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more team news, a summary of the updated Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center at http://msdn.com/vsx scheduled for later this month, more content online including new video webcasts with demos as well as webcast presentations on VSX from recent events. Next month will also include more details of our plans for upcoming versions of the VS SDK as news about new parts of msdn.com that relate to VSX content.

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

.NET Rocks! podcast: Ken Levy on Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX)

vsxteam — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Audio podcast NET Rocks show #303: Ken Levy on Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) is now online.

Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell talk VSX with Ken Levy who these days is all about community and showing developers how to extend Visual Studio. A good part of the new hour interview covers topics discussed in the VSX keynote from DevTeach Vancouver in late 2007.

This is probably the biggest exposure for our VSX community activities to date, which complements the VSX CoDe Focus magazine. This podcast interview covers the story and message around VSX: VS as a platform, VS SDK, VS Shell, DSL Tools, VSIP program, plus VSX examples, online resources, roadmap plans around extending VS, community activities, and more.

If you don't already subscribe to .NET Rocks!, you can download an MP3 or WMA version of this audio podcast interview, both are 43MB files.

SaphireSteel releases new Ruby on Rails IDE based on VS 2008 Shell

vsxteam — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:08:00 GMT

While we've seen several community related projects released last month based on the VS 2008 Shell, just released is the first commercial product based on our free VS 2008 Shell: Ruby In Steel Text Edition by SaphireSteel Software, $49. There are many cool screenshots on the page. You'll see from their requirements at the bottom of the product page that a license copy of VS is not required, an example of how a product can be sold or given away based on the powerful VS 2008 Shell IDE without any VS licensing costs.

Minimum Requirements: Windows XP (service pack 2) or Vista. Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition or above is optional - if you don’t own Visual Studio 2008, Ruby In Steel will install a standalone Ruby-language edition of Visual Studio 2008.

Check out the Ruby In Steel feature list page. Many of the product features are included in the free VS 2008 Shell. This shows how powerful VS 2008 is as a development platform for products and applications based on the free VS 2008 Shell runtime, and why a great 2008 new year's resolution for many developers is to spend more time learning the power of extending VS using the VS SDK. :)

A few excerpts from the InfoWorld article: Ruby on Rails IDE geared to Visual Studio 2008 users:

"We put all our support into Visual Studio so the end-user gets a Ruby-flavored edition of Visual Studio," with its attendant capabilities, Collingbourne said.

Use of the Visual Studio Shell gives SapphireSteel a chance to compete with Eclipse-based IDEs, such as CodeGear's 3rdRail, which also is billed as a Rails IDE, SapphireSteel said.