Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features were most important to them. Debugging was #1 which was very surprising to us. Thinking about it more, it makes sense. In our team we've become so proficient ourselves at reading the XML and making sense of logs that it's easy to forget how difficul...

The Visual Studio team has sponsored a set of Visual Studio Extensibility walkthroughs that will be hosted on www.devx.com.  The first walkthrough showed how to write a blogging extension for VS 2010 and demonstrated the basics of VSPackages, Commands, Tool Windows, and MEF.  In this walkthrough, Steve Apiki shows you how to extend the Vi...

Recently I’ve been helping plan the next version of Visual Studio. It’s way too early to be talking about specifics, but one topic came up this week that I have to share. Package Authoring As some of you may have noticed, many of the regular posters here have been busy writing extensions for the Visual Studio Gallery, some of which have been fe...

If you're experiencing frequent “insufficient memory” errors when doing small cut or copy operations in Visual Studio 2010 RTM, please download this patch to see whether it resolves the issue. What are the symptoms of this bug? Attempting to cut or copy small to moderate amounts of text in Visual Studio 2010 RTM may incorrectly cause th...

Two weeks ago, we launched the Productivity Power Tools at TechEd North America and the response has been great with over 37000 downloads so far!  Many of you also may have noticed that an updated version of the Power Tools was released last week.  This update fixed an issue where the extension update check would fail on machines that req...

[Update 7/20/2010]: Updated changes made for version 10.0.10710.22 of the Pro Power Tools. Please take a look at the changelog. A couple of posts ago I announced the availability of Document Well 2010 Plus as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools. Since then we have received lots of feedback about our extension, for which I am very gr...

UPDATE: This issue is fixed in .NET 4.5. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect. Recently, we’ve seen a number of people reporting problems with resource generation in Visual Studio 2010, particularly when they target .NET Framework 3.5 on 64-bit machines.  In this bl...

This post is about a new way to install extensions to Visual Studio, introduced in VS 2010, called the VSIX file. The information it contains will be of most interest to readers who develop Visual Studio extensions, but I encourage users who download and install those extensions to read it as well. A VSIX file conforms to the ECMA Open Packaging...

The sunset in Seattle was spectacular this evening. My wife and I climbed the water tower in Volunteer Park to look across the Sound as the sun dipped behind the Olympic mountains and, in the space of a few minutes, the sky turned from blue to orange and pink. We both agreed that the Emerald City and its surroundings can be breathtakingly beautiful...

Introduction In MSBuild 4 we introduced several performance improvements, particular for large interdependent builds.  By and large they are automatic and you receive their benefit without making any changes to the way your build process in authored.  However, there are still some cases where we are unable to make the best decision.  One suc...