Mads Kristensen

Most Visual Studio extension authors publish their extensions to the public Marketplace to allow everyone to install them and benefit from the large and open ecosystem. However, some companies create extensions for internal use only. A private gallery allows them to distribute these extensions with ease.

On Friday, May 10th we hosted both internal and external Visual Studio extension authors in the Workshop room in building 18 on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. It was a full day event with keynotes and sessions for 60 attendees – half of which attended //build earlier that same week, and half who came just for the Extensibility Day.

Today, we are making Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1 generally available, as well as the first preview release of Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2. You can download both versions from VisualStudio.com. If you already have Preview installed, you can alternatively click the notification bell from inside Visual Studio to update.

Visual Studio 2019 starts blocking synchronously autoloaded extensions in version 16.1. We’ve seen a tremendous effort of both 1st- and 3rd-party extensions to implement async background load. It’s been truly amazing to see the community of extension authors stepping up to the task.

Take advantage of new features for extension authors in Visual Studio 16.1 Preview 1. This includes support for referencing Shared Projects for a VSIX project, per-monitor awareness, a new SDK meta package, and more.

A few days ago, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2019. But I’ve been using Visual Studio 2019 exclusively since the first internal build – long before the release of Preview 1 in December of 2018. During this time, there has been a lot of little features that have put a smile on my face and made me more productive. I want to share a few of them with you.

Please join us for a day full of Visual Studio extensibility deep dives, geek-outs, and networking on Friday, May 10th, 2019 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Our agenda is intended for existing and new Visual Studio IDE (not VSCode) extension authors and partners and will be highly technical in nature.

Visual Studio ships with Newtonsoft.Json and extension authors can use it too. However, it can be confusing to understand what version to use, how binding redirects work and whether to ship Newtonsoft.Json in the extension itself. This post helps to clarify how it all works.

Explains how Visual Studio versioning works, how extenders should think about it, why there is no Visual Studio version 13.0, and why the year 2213 is the closest we’ll ever get to an alignment again.

Do you want to try the preview of Visual Studio 2019 but worry that your favorite extensions aren’t supported yet? A record number of extensions have already added support for Visual Studio 2019. So there is a good chance your favorite extensions are among them. In fact, more than 850 extensions are currently available, and more are being updated every day.