With last week’s release of the Productivity Power Tools, we announced a new extension – Quick Access – that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE. You can launch Quick Access by pressing Ctrl+3, or by selecting View->Quick Access. Quick Access will allow you to search and execute: ...
This is the second of a two part walkthrough on creating a personalized version of the Start Page which enables users to change a background image. This post builds on the project we created previously. If you have not already done so, I recommend going through part one of the walkthrough before continuing on. We will cover the following topics: ...
One of the coolest features of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to customize the new WPF based Start Page. We have released a project template for creating pages, using the Visual Studio 2010 default page as a starting point. In the next two posts I’m going to walk through the process of creating a new page, testing the page using the VS Experi...
Last week, we released the July 2010 version of the Productivity Power Tools which introduced the Solution Navigator, Quick Access, Automatic Brace Completion and Tools Options support. We've been really excited to see nearly 40,000 downloads last week and the hundreds of pieces of feedback that you have sent us. Based on that feedback, we have jus...
We are very excited to announce the first release of Solution Navigator, a new tool that merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References into a single view. This view can be surfaced as a tool window or, for C# and VB, an interactive tooltip. The Solution Navigator ...
I am pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the Productivity Power Tools. With this release, we've introduced 4 brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version. If you have the Productivity Power Tools installed already, you will get a notification that a new version is available th...
Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which can be traced back to issues with MSBuild. We’ve analyzed all of these and there are several particular cases where a crash can occur. We’ve also added a notification to Windows Error Reporting to help guide those who hit these ...
In my last two posts (here and here) I showed how to enable the unsupported MSBuild debugger to debug a build started on the command line with MSBuild.exe. In this final post, I'll mention some other variations. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click on them to see the full size version....
In my previous post, I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script, and demonstrated it by stepping through the evaluation of a C# project. In this post, I'll keep debugging into the actual build of that project. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click on the...
Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features were most important to them. Debugging was #1 which was very surprising to us. Thinking about it more, it makes sense. In our team we've become so proficient ourselves at reading the XML and making sense of logs that it's easy to forget how difficul...
