Visual Studio Blog

Visual Studio has been around since 1997 when it first released many of its programming tools in a bundle. Back then it came in 2 editions - Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise. Since then the family has expanded to include many more products, tools, and services.

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Tips and Tricks: Zooming in the VS 2010 Editor

January 7th, 2010
(image) You probably know that Visual Studio has an option to change your text size, but did you know you can also zoom the editor in VS 2010?  Ctrl+mouse wheel zooming has been available since the first Visual Studio 2010 CTP, but we’ve finished it by adding a zoom control and key bindings in Beta 2.  Check out this video we’ve ...

Getting Information About Objects, Types, and Members with Expression Trees

January 6th, 2010
Starting with C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, you can use expression trees to get information about objects, types, and members. In this post I’m going to show some examples and explain what benefits you can get by using this technique. If you are not familiar with expression trees, I would recommend reading Charlie Calvert’s blog post ...

Product registration for the About Box in Visual Studio 2010 and the deprecation of IVsInstalledProduct interface

January 5th, 2010
In this article I’ll talk about the information that needs to be specified by a product integrating with Visual Studio to make that product appear in the About box dialog, and the changes to these settings for Visual Studio 2010. You are probably familiar by now with the layout of the Visual Studio’s About Box dialog. (image) Beside ...

Changing Visual Studio’s Color Palette

January 4th, 2010
[Update 2/9/2010] The RC version of the extension is now available (using the same link).  Users who installed this extension for Beta 2 and customized the theme for VS2010 Beta 2 : If you have installed VS2010 RC on the same computer, you may experience a "rainbow colored" VS.  To remedy this problem, please do one of the ...

Changing Visual Studio’s Color Palette

January 4th, 2010
[Update 2/9/2010] The RC version of the extension is now available (using the same link).  Users who installed this extension for Beta 2 and customized the theme for VS2010 Beta 2 : If you have installed VS2010 RC on the same computer, you may experience a "rainbow colored" VS.  To remedy this problem, please do one of the ...

Codecast interviews about the Editor and Extensibility

December 19th, 2009
  Happy holidays everyone!  Chris Granger and I met up with Ken Levy the other day to talk about the new Editor and VS Extensibility. Ken is responsible for the code cast interviews at code magazine.  Chris and I sat down with Ken to discuss the Editor, the SDK, the Extension Manager, VSIX and some of the cool new things we’...

What’s A PkgDef? And Why?

December 18th, 2009
A .pkgdef file is way to encapsulate application configuration information in an easily editable, distributable, and deployable form. It was introduced in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to support the configuration of Isolated Shell applications. In Visual Studio 2010, .pkgdef files take on a more expanded role and are much more integrated into both ...

What’s A PkgDef? And Why?

December 18th, 2009
A .pkgdef file is way to encapsulate application configuration information in an easily editable, distributable, and deployable form. It was introduced in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to support the configuration of Isolated Shell applications. In Visual Studio 2010, .pkgdef files take on a more expanded role and are much more integrated into both ...

Customizing Visual Studio 2010

December 14th, 2009
Don’t like where a button is by default?  Go ahead and move it.  To speed up your workflow, add handy commands to a context menu.  To reduce clutter, remove commands that you never use.  Yes, customizing the UI can take a little while to get it just right, but doing so will provide you with a workspace that can boost ...

Developer Tools Ecosystem Summit Videos Now Available!

December 10th, 2009
Video recordings of the talks that were given at the 2009 Developer Tools Ecosystem Summit have just been posted on Channel 9.  There are some great talks on topics ranging from VSX basics, to the extending the new Editor, to deploying and sharing your extensions on the Visual Studio Gallery.  Check them out and let us know what you ...