Mads Kristensen

Principal Product Manager, Visual Studio

Mads Kristensen is a principal program manager on the Visual Studio team and has published over 150 free Visual Studio extensions. He blogs about anything related to Visual Studio and can often be found hosting various shows on the Visual Studio YouTube channel..

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Delivering on a promise – the essential extension pack

June 24th, 2020
During Microsoft Build 2020 in May, developers watching the live stream asked me to make it easy to acquire the basic extensions all Visual Studio users would benefit from. What a great idea, so of course I said yes. The wait is now over, get the The Essentials extension pack today! (image) During my Visual Studio 2019 (remote dev) ...

Learn with Visual Studio Remote Office Hours

May 27th, 2020
A new live broadcast directly from the Visual Studio team (my garage to be exact) is now streaming near you every Thursday morning. It's about everything Visual Studio and you get rare insights into the inner workings of features, processes, and the people that make it all happen. This is like being in the machine room and you get to see and ...

The Spring 2020 Roadmap for Visual Studio published

March 2nd, 2020
The Visual Studio roadmap has been updated to provide a peek into the work planned for Visual Studio through June 2020. It captures significant capabilities that we plan to add, but it's not a comprehensive feature list.

Visual Studio extensibility is better with IntelliCode

October 8th, 2019
Installing the Visual Studio extension development workload presents you with a choice of optional components. Looking at the list might leave you rather confused, because how are various C++ components and the Class Designer especially relevant to writing extension? And where is IntelliCode?

Watch the latest Visual Studio extensibility videos

September 26th, 2019
We have been posting several short videos about Visual Studio extensibility to our YouTube channel in the past couple of months. We chose the topics for the first videos, but now it’s time for you to tell us what videos to record next.

Get more fresh content on Visual Studio’s YouTube channel

August 27th, 2019
Whether you like short how-to videos or longer deep dives, the Visual Studio YouTube channel has something for you. With fresh content published once to several times a week, there are always new and interesting videos to help you stay current on everything Visual Studio.

Async loaded .NET projects may impact Visual Studio extensions

August 8th, 2019
In Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3, the CSProj project system (C#/VB non-SDK style) introduces a new way of loading called Partial Load Mode (PLM). After the solution loads, the project system is doing design time builds in the background, leaving the UI responsive and interactive. Extensions may need to adjust for this behavior change.

Theming in Visual Studio just got a lot easier

August 1st, 2019
Sometimes the default themes for Visual Studio just aren’t enough. Lucky for us, we’ve just redesigned the process of creating and importing custom themes.

Status on Visual Studio feature suggestions

July 31st, 2019
Visual Studio receives over 500 feature suggestions from customers every month on the Developer Community website. Handling that amount is a huge effort and we’d like to share with you how we handle this volume and the steps that we take to respond to them all.

Checklist for writing great Visual Studio extensions

July 11th, 2019
Great Visual Studio extensions share a few key features that sets them apart from the rest. They look and feel well crafted, are performant and reliable, do what they advertise to perfection, and blend in naturally among Visual Studio’s own features.