Visual Studio Blog

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

Using the VSIX Manifest Editor

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

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...

Searching and Navigating Code in Visual Studio 2010

Every developer knows that navigating code is vital to happy and productive coding. We’ve added several new features for code search and navigation in Visual Studio 2010, including Navigate To and an improved Call Hierarchy, to complement search staples like the Find and Replace dialog and Incremental Search. With such a wide variety of ...

Getting Information About Objects, Types, and Members with Expression Trees

Starting with C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, you can use expression trees to get information about objects, types, and members. In this post I’m going to show some examples and explain what benefits you can get by using this technique. If you are not familiar with expression trees, I would recommend reading Charlie Calvert’s blog post ...

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

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 ...

Changing Visual Studio’s Color Palette

[Update 2/9/2010] The RC version of the extension is now available (using the same link).  Users who installed this extension for Beta 2 and customized the theme for VS2010 Beta 2 : If you have installed VS2010 RC on the same computer, you may experience a "rainbow colored" VS.  To remedy this problem, please do one of the ...

Changing Visual Studio’s Color Palette

[Update 2/9/2010] The RC version of the extension is now available (using the same link).  Users who installed this extension for Beta 2 and customized the theme for VS2010 Beta 2 : If you have installed VS2010 RC on the same computer, you may experience a "rainbow colored" VS.  To remedy this problem, please do one of the ...