Last week we released the first version of a new project template, VSPackage Builder, which enables rapid development of the command UI and tool window infrastructure of VS 2010 extensions. VSPackage Builder requires VS 2010 Pro or above, and can be installed directly from within VS using the Extension Manager, or indirectly from the Visual Studio ...

We are pleased to announce the availability of Emacs Emulation as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010!  This extension provides basic support for Emacs keybindings and text editing commands, very similar to the built-in Emacs keyboard layout in VS 2008.  Once the extension is installed you should be able to use familiar keyboard short...

 One of our top reported Microsoft Connect issues since RTM has been that the Find and Replace dialog grows 16px on each use.  On repeated use, this can quickly take up your entire screen real estate.  We now have a patch available for this issue which you can download here.If you have any additional questions, feel free to leave com...

With last week’s release of the Productivity Power Tools, we announced a new extension – Quick Access – that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE.  You can launch Quick Access by pressing Ctrl+3, or by selecting View->Quick Access. Quick Access will allow you to search and execute: ...

This is the second of a two part walkthrough on creating a personalized version of the Start Page which enables users to change a background image. This post builds on the project we created previously. If you have not already done so, I recommend going through part one of the walkthrough before continuing on. We will cover the following topics: ...

One of the coolest features of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to customize the new WPF based Start Page. We have released a project template for creating pages, using the Visual Studio 2010 default page as a starting point. In the next two posts I’m going to walk through the process of creating a new page, testing the page using the VS Experi...

We are very excited to announce the first release of Solution Navigator, a new tool that merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References into a single view. This view can be surfaced as a tool window or, for C# and VB, an interactive tooltip. The Solution Navigator ...

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which can be traced back to issues with MSBuild.  We’ve analyzed all of these and there are several particular cases where a crash can occur.  We’ve also added a notification to Windows Error Reporting to help guide those who hit these ...

In my last two posts (here and here) I showed how to enable the unsupported MSBuild debugger to debug a build started on the command line with MSBuild.exe. In this final post, I'll mention some other variations. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click on them to see the full size version....

In my previous post, I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script, and demonstrated it by stepping through the evaluation of a C# project. In this post, I'll keep debugging into the actual build of that project. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click on the...