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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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.

Visual Studio tips and tricks

June 25th, 2019
Whether you are new or have been using Visual Studio for years, there are a bunch of tips and tricks that can make you more productive. We’ve been sharing tips on Twitter using the #vstip hashtag for a while, and this is a collection of the best ones so far.

Create a private gallery for self-hosted Visual Studio extensions

June 11th, 2019
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.

Visual Studio Extensibility Day 2019 was a hit

May 29th, 2019
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.

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1 now generally available (and 16.2 Preview 1 as well)

May 22nd, 2019
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.

Updates to synchronous autoload of extensions in Visual Studio 2019

May 20th, 2019
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.

New features for extension authors in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1

April 11th, 2019
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.

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