I have had several customers asking me about MSBuild and how to get started learning the language and using it. A little over a year and a half ago, I joined the MSBuild team. When I got here, I did not even know what MSBuild was, and I have been a Visual Studio user for many years. This article is to help you understand what MSBuild is, how ...
We had in the last days a couple of reports of Visual Studio’s background flickering on old LCD monitors because of the texture and the colors used by default by the shell. So far we have not been able to reproduce in-house the problem (and I suspect this is caused by either old video card drivers or monitors not supporting properly the ...
One of the most powerful tools for troubleshooting issues that involve Visual Studio extensions is often overlooked, even though it has been around for quite some time (since VS 2005). Anyone wondering what Visual Studio is doing with their VS Package, Extension, MEF Component, or pkgdef file should ask the IDE for an activity log. In ...
One of the cool new features of MSBuild 4.0 is the extensible task factory. Task factories allow you to include scripts directly in your project file (or an imported .targets file) and have those scripts parsed and executed by your favorite interpreter. Those scripts might even be C# or VB.NET code snippets that get compiled into ...
VSIX is the new technology used for deploying extensions in Visual Studio 2010. The primary goal of this new technology is to encourage extension creation and consumption by easing the management (“management” meaning Browsing/Installing/Uninstalling/Enabling/Disabling) of Visual Studio extensions. To take full advantage of the VSIX ...
Introduction
With the release of .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 comes MSBuild 4.0. Among the many great features in this version are new mechanisms to allow you (or your build lab) to extend the default build targets files with your own customizations. While some of this functionality did exist in previous versions, it has been made ...
In this post I’ll try to answer the most common questions I find on forums and in documentation feedback about C# covariance and contravariance. It’s a big topic for a single blog post, so expect to see a lot of “more information” links.
Special thanks to Eric Lippert and Chris Burrows for reviewing and providing helpful comments.
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This is the first part in a seven part series. Links to the other parts are included at the bottom of this post.
Now that the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2010 is publicly available, we’ve started receiving questions from inquisitive users about how Visual Studio 2010 itself was built. In particular, one questioner wanted to know ...
UPDATE: This issue is fixed in .NET 4.5. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect.
If you have the RC build of VS2010, you are targeting the 3.5, 3.0, or 2.0 Framework, you have a VB or C# project which has a lot of references, and you also have a lot of .resx ...
Have you ever wanted to quickly share a code sample to Twitter or your blog without leaving Visual Studio? Steve Apiki walks through how to create an extension for Visual Studio 2010 that does just that.Walkthrough: http://www.devx.com/VS_2010/Article/44073 His walkthrough touches on a number of extensibility options inside Visual Studio...