Next step in VS 2005 SDK

A couple of weeks ago, we delivered the Visual Studio 2005 SDK v3.0 on the Microsoft Download Center. This is a good milestone for our VSIP partners as well as the broad community, as it contains many exciting features that allow people to extend Visual Studio. Here are a few things that I wanted to highlight:

· Integrated IronPython language sample (including both Windows and Web project support)

· New documentation and samples demonstrating how to add editors, project systems, language services, tool windows and more to Visual Studio using C++ or C#

· Domain-Specific Language Tools 1.0 RTM

· New documentation and samples showing Team System and Team Foundation Server extensibility

· MPPG/MPLex Tools for writing language parsers in C# code

That last feature is a great example of Microsoft partnering with the academic community. The MPPG/MPLex tools allow you turn a language lexer/parser specification using standard lex/yacc syntax into a parser for your language. The difference here is that the emitted parser is in C# code, which then allows you to easily plug your language service into Visual Studio. There is a sample in the SDK called ManagedMyC that demonstrates this process.

The MPPG/MPLex tools are derived from the Gardens Point Parser Generator and are results of the collaboration between the VS SDK team and the folks at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Specifically, I would like to thank Prof. John Gough and Dr. Wayne Kelly for their research and development efforts in this area. Through this collaboration with the academic community, we are now able to provide a solution for easily integrating a language into Visual Studio using entirely managed code.

Namaste!