VSX Team Blog : VSX Community

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 DevCon Sessions Posted

vsxteam — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:27:46 GMT

If you haven't heard already, we are hosting the first-ever public VSX conference from September 15-16 on the main Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. The conference is focused entirely on Visual Studio Extensibility and will present a good mix of introductory and advanced topics. You will get a chance to meet the folks who work on Visual Studio in the conference.

Since this is our first year hosting this conference, we are having an introductory price of $100 for registration!

We have just posted some session details on the conference web site.

VSX Futures

Speaker: Rico Mariani (Principal Architect, Microsoft)
Rico Mariani, Architect for the Visual Studio Platform team shares his ideas and long term goals for Visual Studio. Learn how industry trends are changing the way you will develop software and how Visual Studio will lead the way.

VS Extensibility Architecture: Intro & Advanced Topics (2 Sessions)

Speaker: Douglas Hodges (Principal Architect, Microsoft)
Extending the Visual Studio (VS) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) using the VS Package Architecture. For integrating commercial products, supporting new languages and participating as a 1st class citizen within the IDE, Visual Studio’s service and windowing architecture is exposed through a package model. Learn about building your own package and integrating with other services and packages within the environment in this 2 part session presented by one of Visual Studio’s original architects.

Hobby To Profit – How to Market Your Extensions

Speaker: Joe Marini (Director, Microsoft)
Have you been thinking about how you might be able take your Visual Studio Extension from a free download to a profitable product? Microsoft has a variety of resources that supports the ecosystem of VSX developers. From the free Visual Studio Gallery to the co-marketing benefits that come with being a member of the VSIP program you'll learn about the various ways to take advantage of what Microsoft has to offer.

Apples and Oranges or Fruit Salad? A Look at Open Source Versus Commercial Platform Strategies

Speaker: Tim Wagner (Development Lead, Microsoft)
The speaker, a former Eclipse Web Tool Platform Project lead now working with the Microsoft Visual Studio Platform team, takes a look at the differences and (surprising) similarities of the Eclipse platform strategy and that of Visual Studio. The talk examines licensing and pricing models and how choices for the platform affect both end user adoption and add-in provider opportunities. Deep focus by the Eclipse Foundation on enabling add-in providers through EPIC and other mechanisms bears a strong similarity to the way large commercial vendors such as Microsoft build partner programs, including marketing support, lead generation, and other conventional business activities. Recent changes by the Visual Studio Ecosystem team to make the platform easier to extend and adopt are clearly informed by success in the open source world and are evolving to look increasingly like it. We will also examine membership pricing and look at the impact different membership classes (such as Strategic Developers in Eclipse and Premier Partners in Visual Studio) affect the course of the platform and its tools. Finally, we'll take a brief look at innovation drivers and rates of change in an attempt to answer the question of how (and whether) open versus commercial development affects the evolution of the underlying platform.

Building Custom Tools with Visual Studio 2008 Shell

Speaker: James Lau (Lead Program Manager, Microsoft)
Do you want to consolidate your organization’s software tools into a single environment for either internal or external use? Do you want to create an integrated vertical market toolset inside a world-class IDE? If your answer is yes to either of the above, you need to learn more about the Visual Studio Shell product. Visual Studio Shell is a new offering in Visual Studio 2008. With this new product, tools developers can now easily build their own customized IDE on the same platform that Visual Studio is built on; royalty free. Whether your customers are looking to build an “Express” edition of their programming language products, or they you want to build an IDE for specialized controls systems, the Visual Studio Shell can help them you cut cost and focus on their your areas of expertise. In this session, we will walk through how to build a custom IDE with the Shell. You will walk away inspired to build your own IDE on this new platform!

The VSXtra community project: Driving toward a new Visual Studio Managed Package Framework

Speaker: Istvan Novak (VSX Insider, Grepton Informatics)
Visual Studio package development with VS SDK 2008 is easier than ever before. Starting a new VSPackage is quite easy using the Visual Studio Integration Package wizard and the Managed Package Framework. However, when going into coding developers have to face with COM-related types and interfaces too often. It’s a kind of schizophrenic state to work in .NET using COM-driven approach and dealing with plumbing too much.

In my session I introduce you the current state and results of an experimental community project codenamed “VSXtra” (http://www.codeplex.com/VSXtra). This project enumerates many patterns that drive toward a new and improved Managed Package Framework using the great pillars of the current .NET Framework like metadata, generics, LINQ, C#3.0 syntax, etc. The aim of this session is to share my thoughts with you, open my ears for your feedback and widen the community around improving VSX development experience.

Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools

Speaker: Gareth Jones (Senior Software Developer, Microsoft)
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 will examine the domain-specific development pattern, and see how to build a simple graphical language from scratch. You will also learn how to make your graphical language domain-specific and finally how to add architectural guidance directly to the tool.

Extending ASP.NET MVC with Custom HTML Helpers

Speaker: Stephen Walther (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)
Microsoft ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft's newest framework for building agile, loosely coupled, highly testable web applications. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, but not a replacement, for the current ASP.NET Web Forms Framework. Because ASP.NET MVC is a new framework, there are exciting opportunities for creating new extensions to the underlying framework. In this talk, you learn how to create new HTML Helpers for ASP.NET MVC. An HTML Helper is the equivalent of an ASP.NET control in the new world of ASP.NET MVC.

Deploying VSX Projects

Speaker: Aaron Marten (Software Developer, Microsoft)
This talk covers distributing various Visual Studio Extensibility components. Whether you are shipping a VSPackage, Add-in, Project Template, or Toolbox Control, check out this webcast for tips and tricks and to avoid common pitfalls with deploying your Visual Studio extensions, including several demos for these topics

How I Extend Visual Studio

Speaker: Members of the VSX Community
Members of the Visual Studio community will share just how they leverage Visual Studio to deliver valuable products for their customers and make their development process more productive. You’ll see demos & presentations from a variety partners & community members in a fast paced fun session.

Visual Studio 2008: How to integrate a Debugger into Visual Studio
Speaker: TBD

Extensibility points in Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server
Speaker: TBD

Extensibility points in Visual Studio 2008 Team System
Speaker: TBD

10 Ways to Extend VS and become a more Productive Developer
Speaker: TBD

This is not the complete list! We are going to make updates over the next couple of weeks continuously. So check back often.

If you haven't registered yet, you can click on the big orange button below to register for the event.

If you are a VSIP partner, you should use this link to register instead. If you have any questions about this conference, you can contact us at vsxconf@microsoft.com.

Cheers,

James Lau
Lead Program Manager, VSX Team

VSX Survey (Fall 2007) results

vsxteam — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:29:03 GMT

Below are the key results from the VSX survey from the fall of 2007. Please take a few minutes an participate in our VSX Survey (Spring 2008). Once our latest survey closes, we will share the results soon after including the trends between surveys.

Have you ever installed an extension to Visual Studio such as a macro, Add-in, productivity tool, custom control, or other component that was not included within Visual Studio?

(Check all that apply. Skip if you've never installed an extension for Visual Studio.)

· [37%] - I have installed one or more Microsoft extensions

· [30%] - I have installed one or more commercial 3rd party extensions

· [29%] - I have installed one or more non-commercial 3rd party extensions

Have you used the Visual Studio SDK?

(Check all versions that apply. Skip if you've never used the Visual Studio SDK.)

· [74%] - Visual Studio 2005 SDK

· [26%] - Visual Studio 2008 SDK

What kind of extensions for Visual Studio do you create?

(Check all that apply)

· [20%] - Macros

· [54%] - Add-ins

· [76%] - Packages

· [15%] - Content

· [28%] - Controls

What is the primary technology you are building into Visual Studio?

(Check all that apply)

· [18%] - Reusable Components (WinForms Control, WebForms Control, Shared Library, ActiveX Component, etc.)

· [10%] - Application Lifecycle Management (Source Code Control, Project Management, Bug Tracking, Asset Management, etc.)

· [13%] - Code Analysis (Integrating with Microsoft languages, Source Navigation, Obfuscation, Modeling, Code Generation, Code Understanding, etc.)

· [15%] - Programming Language (Adding a new language to Visual Studio, Compiler, Debugger, Project System, Language Service, etc.)

· [18%] - Support Tools (Database Management, Installers, Tools that support the software development process, etc.)

· [13%] - Domain Specific Language (DSL) Designers (Code modeling, architecture modeling, infrastructure modeling, industry modeling, UI modeling, data modeling)

· [13%] - Content (Help Documentation, Templates, Wizards, Process Guidance, Policy, etc.)

What version(s) of Visual Studio do you extend?

(Check all that apply)

· [26%] - Visual Studio 2003

· [95%] - Visual Studio 2005

· [42%] - Visual Studio 2008

· [10%] - Visual Studio 2008 Shell (Integrated)

· [10%] - Visual Studio 2008 Shell (Isolated)

How are your Visual Studio extensions deployed?

(Check all that apply)

· [27%] - Commercial extensions for resale.

· [29%] - Internal line of business extensions.

· [12%] - Shareware or freeware extensions.

· [11%] - Shared or open source extension projects.

· [21%] - Extensions for personal use that are not distributed.

What language do you use to build extensions for Visual Studio?

(Check all that apply)

· [68%] - C#

· [20%] - C++

· [9%] - Visual Basic

· [4%] - Other

Have you visited any of these extensibility websites?

(Check all that apply)

· [18%] - VSX Forum on msdn.com

· [23%] - CodePlex.com

· [21%] - msdn.com/vsx

· [21%] - vsipmembers.com

· [17%] - VSX Team blog(s)

How satisfied are you with the video contents?

· [3%] - Very satisfied

· [18%] - Satisfied

· [17%] - Neither satisfied nor unsatisfied

· [3%] - Dissatisfied

· [1%] - Very Dissatisfied

· [59%] - N/A - Never used it

How satisfied are you with the QuickStart Tutorials?

· [2%] - Very satisfied

· [26%] - Satisfied

· [29%] - Neither satisfied nor unsatisfied

· [3%] - Dissatisfied

· [2%] - Very Dissatisfied

· [38%] - N/A - Never used it

How satisfied are you with the transparency of the team’s direction and status, published via the VSX Team blog?

· [5%] - Very satisfied

· [36%] - Satisfied

· [18%] - Neither satisfied nor unsatisfied

· [4%] - Dissatisfied

· [1%] - Very Dissatisfied

· [35%] - N/A - Never used it

How satisfied are you with the VSX forum on msdn.com?

· [6%] - Very satisfied

· [32%] - Satisfied

· [23%] - Neither satisfied nor unsatisfied

· [6%] - Dissatisfied

· [1%] - Very Dissatisfied

· [32%] - N/A - Never used it

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

VSX Tour (Spring 2008) session online

vsxteam — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:32:46 GMT

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

VSX Tour in Europe (Spring 2008) event reports

vsxteam — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:42:34 GMT

Updated: James Lau has completed the VSX tour with Jean-Marc Prieur.

To view the VSX tour presentation online, see Jean-Marc's blog post: Watch VISUG session on VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility) online

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

Sign-up for the VSX Flash Newsletter email subscription

vsxteam — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:39:14 GMT

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

VSX Developer Center update - June 2008

vsxteam — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:26:48 GMT

The VSX Developer Center at http://msdn.com/vsx has been significantly updated today.

There will be about 20 new pages added to the VSX dev center today, about 3 times as many pages that exist on it today. 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.

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.

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 Developer Center updated - May 2008

vsxteam — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:33:42 GMT

The VSX Developer Center has been updated as part of a rollout of several developer centers on msdn.com with a new and improved layout and templates.

Next week the VSX Forum will be updated with a new UI. Next month the Visual Studio Gallery will be updated with many new site features.

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 Survey (Spring 2008) invitation

vsxteam — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:42:00 GMT

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 ecosystem.

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