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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Use your favorite extensions with Visual Studio 2019

February 22nd, 2019
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.

Build Visual Studio extensions using Visual Studio extensions

December 20th, 2018
What if the community of extension authors banded together to add powerful features to Visual Studio that made it easier to create extensions? That’s the idea behind Extensibility Essentials – an extension pack that ships community-recommended extensions for extension authors.

New Preview label for Visual Studio extensions

December 7th, 2018
Visual Studio extensions can now be marked with a Preview label which is shown very clearly on the Visual Studio Marketplace. This gives your customers clear expectations that this version could contain issues as you are actively developing new features. Learn how to enable the Preview label here.

Simplify extension development with PackageReference and the VSSDK meta package

October 10th, 2018
Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 made it possible to use the PackageReference syntax to reference NuGet packages in Visual Studio Extensibility (VSIX) projects. This makes it much simpler to reason about NuGet packages and opens the door for having a complete meta package containing the entire VSSDK. Before using PackageReference, here’s ...

How to upgrade extensions to support Visual Studio 2019

September 26th, 2018
Recently, I’ve updated over 30 of my extensions to support Visual Studio 2019 (16.0). To make sure they work, I got my hands on a very early internal build of VS 2019 to test with (working on the Visual Studio team has its benefits). This upgrade process is one of the easiest I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to share my steps with you to...

Getting started writing Visual Studio extensions

September 26th, 2018
I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual Studio, but unless you understand the basics of how the extensibility system works, then you are setting yourself up ...

Improving the responsiveness of critical scenarios by updating auto load behavior for extensions

May 16th, 2018
The Visual Studio team partners with extension authors to provide a productive development environment for users, who rely on a rich ecosystem of quality extensions. Today, we're introducing an update to extension auto load based on feedback from our community of developers, who need to quickly start Visual Studio and load their solution while...