Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

January 2010 - Visual Studio Blog

What is the difference between “dynamic” and “object” keywords?

January 25, 2010 Jan 25, 2010 01/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
Let’s take a quick look at the object keyword first. I’m not going to talk a lot about it because it’s been around since C# 1.0. This keyword is nothing more than a shortcut for System.Object, which is the root type in the C# class hierarchy. (However, as Eric Lippert pointed out in his blog post, not everything in C# derives from object...

MSBuild Interview on CodeCast

January 22, 2010 Jan 22, 2010 01/22/10
Visual Studio Blog
I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with Ken Levy and talk about MSBuild. Ken is responsible for the CodeCast interviews at code magazine.The interview consists of an in-depth technical and scenario discussion on how and why to use MSBuild, both in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.  We also discussed new ...

Using the VSIX Manifest Editor

January 19, 2010 Jan 19, 2010 01/19/10
Visual Studio Blog
In Visual Studio 2010, we provide a new way of packaging and deploying extensions known as a VSIX. Several project templates in Visual Studio generate VSIX files (from the most basic, VSIX Project, the MEF editor extensions and Visual Studio Packages). The VSIX itself is a simple zip file (using the Open Packaging Convention) containing some ...

How to read/write the new Visual C++ project properties

January 14, 2010 Jan 14, 2010 01/14/10
Andrew Arnott
Visual C++ 2010 introduces several new project and tool properties, and deprecates some old ones.  If you’re writing a project template or Visual Studio extension that needs to programmatically read and write the new properties, you will find that these properties are not available on the standard VCConfiguration, VCCLCompilerTool, etc. set...

Product registration for the About Box in Visual Studio 2010 and the deprecation of IVsInstalledProduct interface

January 5, 2010 Jan 5, 2010 01/5/10
Visual Studio Blog
In this article I’ll talk about the information that needs to be specified by a product integrating with Visual Studio to make that product appear in the About box dialog, and the changes to these settings for Visual Studio 2010. You are probably familiar by now with the layout of the Visual Studio’s About Box dialog. (image) Beside ...