I was in the middle of creating UI mockups for some extensions I’ve been working on and realized that I needed some icons to polish off the sketch.  Sure, I could have just grabbed a screenshot of VS, opened up my favorite image editor, and pulled out the icon that I needed…but what if my “perfect” icon wasn’t in VS?  After all, these ext...

As you may know, Visual Studio’s cut and copy commands are useful for more than just selected text.  If you invoke them when there is no selection, VS will cut or copy your entire line, which saves you the trouble of selecting the line before adding it to the clipboard.  Although a lot of developers find this helpful, we occasionally hear feedback ...

This is the fifth article in the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series. This week, guest author Matthew Johnson presents a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Visual Studio's innovative window management system. - Paul Harrington Background Several people have expressed interest in how much effort was required to write a WPF window management system...

For those using the Visual Studio 2010 SDK to create extensions for Visual Studio, you should find the creation and use of .pkgdef files to be mostly automatic (see What's a PkgDef and Why?). However, like anything involving computers and software, there are occasions that require manual intervention because they aren’t covered by the automatic s...

In VS 2010, we made a design decision to move the “X” from the right side of the Tab Well  to within each tab.  Before (VS 2008) After (VS 2010) The majority of feedback around this change was positive, but, as with most UI changes, there has been a vocal group that preferred the older placement.  When asked what they liked...

This is the fourth part in the series of posts on Visual Studio 2010’s use of WPF. This week, we’ll take a look at how Visual Studio 2010 detects and hosts WPF content ‘natively’ while at the same time allowing for non-WPF content. Frames and Panes In the Visual Studio extensibility model, the client area of a window is called a “pane” and it is ...

Text clarity in Visual Studio 2010 has been a hot topic throughout the product cycle. Each time we talk or write about it, we seem to invite yet another round comments, some of them quite emotionally charged. We take such feedback very seriously because, whether the comments are completely justified or not, there’s always some nugget of customer di...

Hi, I am Richa Prasad and I am the Program Manager for the Project System team. This means that I work on many features for managing projects and solutions. One such feature is the conversion process. We have recently received many requests for making the conversion process optional; i.e. supporting the ability to open old Visual Studio version pr...

As most of you know, we’ve rebuilt the editor and much of Visual Studio using WPF for Visual Studio 2010.  This allows for a wealth of new visualizations and enables many new extensibility scenarios, often making previously impossible tasks possible and previously difficult tasks much easier.  Unfortunately, the WPF text team has been plagued with ...

I was spending some time responding to Connect bugs the other day when I ran across this suggestion: “It would be nice to have a clip board history window that could be next to the control toolbox as a nice utility window. (Often in presentations I see Microsoft presenters using a custom clipboard tool for such a purpose). Many times I wish I coul...