If you haven’t read the news on other notable MSDN blogs, I’m pleased to announce that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidates are now available for download!  Currently the downloads are only available to MSDN subscribers, but they will be released to the public this Wednesday, February 10th.  This release includes a “go-liv...

With the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate around the corner, I would like to talk briefly about some changes we have made to the first-launch-after-installation sequence. Many of you may notice that the first time you start VS after installing, once you have selected a profile, it takes a long time for the main VS window to appear, esp...

UPDATE 2/8: I forgot to mention a change to the VSIX file format in the Release Candidate that might impact your extensions.  The valid <Edition> values (under <SupportedProducts>) have been updated to better reflect our SKU branding.  The only valid values for RC and RTM are: IntegratedShell, Pro, Premium, Ulti...

If you like the tips and tricks we sometimes post on this blog, you might want to check out the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks blog.  It’s written by Zain Naboulsi, a Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, and it’s devoted to these little productivity boosters.  We’ll continue to post the occasional tip here on the Visual Studio blog, and we’ll a...

Let’s take a quick look at the object keyword first. I’m not going to talk a lot about it because it’s been around since C# 1.0. This keyword is nothing more than a shortcut for System.Object, which is the root type in the C# class hierarchy. (However, as Eric Lippert pointed out in his blog post, not everything in C# derives from object.) This is ...

Let’s take a quick look at the object keyword first. I’m not going to talk a lot about it because it’s been around since C# 1.0. This keyword is nothing more than a shortcut for System.Object, which is the root type in the C# class hierarchy. (However, as Eric Lippert pointed out in his blog post, not everything in C# derives from...

I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with Ken Levy and talk about MSBuild. Ken is responsible for the CodeCast interviews at code magazine.The interview consists of an in-depth technical and scenario discussion on how and why to use MSBuild, both in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.  We also discussed new feature...

Here’s a quick tip of the day for anyone who wants to quickly use the new search feature of the New Project Dialog and the Extension Manager.  You can press Ctrl+E to quickly set focus to the search box.  Did you know that this same keyboard shortcut also works in Windows Explorer, IE and other applications?  Give it a shot!

In Visual Studio 2010, we provide a new way of packaging and deploying extensions known as a VSIX. Several project templates in Visual Studio generate VSIX files (from the most basic, VSIX Project, the MEF editor extensions and Visual Studio Packages). The VSIX itself is a simple zip file (using the Open Packaging Convention) containing some conten...

Every developer knows that navigating code is vital to happy and productive coding. We’ve added several new features for code search and navigation in Visual Studio 2010, including Navigate To and an improved Call Hierarchy, to complement search staples like the Find and Replace dialog and Incremental Search. With such a wide variety of options, we...