One of the most powerful tools for troubleshooting issues that involve Visual Studio extensions is often overlooked, even though it has been around for quite some time (since VS 2005). Anyone wondering what Visual Studio is doing with their VS Package, Extension, MEF Component, or pkgdef file should ask the IDE for an activity log. In this art...

VSIX is the new technology used for deploying extensions in Visual Studio 2010. The primary goal of this new technology is to encourage extension creation and consumption by easing the management (“management” meaning Browsing/Installing/Uninstalling/Enabling/Disabling) of Visual Studio extensions. To take full advantage of the VSIX installer for d...

Introduction With the release of .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 comes MSBuild 4.0. Among the many great features in this version are new mechanisms to allow you (or your build lab) to extend the default build targets files with your own customizations. While some of this functionality did exist in previous versions, it has been made even ...

In this post I’ll try to answer the most common questions I find on forums and in documentation feedback about C# covariance and contravariance. It’s a big topic for a single blog post, so expect to see a lot of “more information” links. Special thanks to Eric Lippert and Chris Burrows for reviewing and providing helpful comments. What are cova...

This is the first part in a seven part series. Links to the other parts are included at the bottom of this post. Now that the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2010 is publicly available, we’ve started receiving questions from inquisitive users about how Visual Studio 2010 itself was built. In particular, one questioner wanted to know if we we...

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.   If you have the RC build of VS2010, you are targeting the 3.5, 3.0, or 2.0 Framework, you have a VB or C# project which has a lot of references, and you also have a lot of .resx files...

Have you ever wanted to quickly share a code sample to Twitter or your blog without leaving Visual Studio?  Steve Apiki walks through how to create an extension for Visual Studio 2010 that does just that.Walkthrough: http://www.devx.com/VS_2010/Article/44073 His walkthrough touches on a number of extensibility options inside Visual Studio 2010...

Ken Levy and I sat down last week to chat about the new VS 2010 IDE and some of the great features we’ve added for this release.  From the CodeCast site: “In this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy interviews Weston Hutchins, program manager on the Visual Studio Shell team (team responsible for the core IDE services and extensibility architecture a...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 custom Start Pages will fail to load in Visual Studio 2010 RC due to WPF namespaces changes caused by Shell assembly refactoring between the Beta2 and RC releases.  Specifically Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.UI.dll has been split between Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.10.0.dll and a new assembly, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Sh...

UPDATE:  There is now a patch available for this issue in the VS 2010 RC.  If you're experiencing frequent crashing when IntelliSense pops up or is dismissed, please download this patch to see whether it resolves the issue.  This bug has also been fixed for VS 2010 RTM. Shortly before the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) was released,...