VSX Team Blog : VSX Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating an Item Template:

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

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

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK Documentation is now available!

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

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

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

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

Tangible T4 Editor for VS 2010 Beta 2

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

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

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

vsxteam — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:10:00 GMT

We shipped Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1!

The Beta 1 bits shipped on MSDN yesterday and will be available for general consumption Wednesday morning.

You'll be able to get more information about Visual Studio 2010 and the download locations here our Product Page.

For a list of some of the cool features we've added to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, take a look at Jason Zander's blog.

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK will also be released this week. Once that's available, we'll provide a link on this blog.

We'll be dusting off the cob webs on this blog and start adding more Beta 1 content in the coming weeks to help you get familiar with all the new features.

Go ahead and start downloading Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 tomorrow morning and let us know what you like and what we can improve on.

Happy New Year

vsxteam — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:07:00 GMT

Happy New Year!

Our team blog has been quiet recently mainly with several changes on our team and vacations but we'll all be back January 5th, ready for a new year, and ready to continue making extending Visual Studio easier for all our customers.

2009 will be a great year as we start the year working on the next Visual Studio SDK and of course, Visual Studio 10 Beta. In the next few blogs, we will start looking at some of the new Visual Studio 10 features that we're adding to the platform and the changes for the SDK.

For now, we want to wish you all a Happy New Year and we're looking forward to helping you build Visual Studio extensions in 2009!

-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 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!