Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Category : Visual Studio

VSIX Best Practices

June 9, 2010 Jun 9, 2010 06/9/10
Visual Studio Blog
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 ...

Programmatically adding/removing/querying VC++ Build Customizations

May 25, 2010 May 25, 2010 05/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
Build Customizations (Custom Build Rules in earlier editions) are commonly used for invoking external tools that translate files from one format to the other, often resulting in C++ sources that can be compiled at the C++ compilation step. In this post, I will explain how to programmatically add, remove,  and query for Build Customizations ...

Excuse the Mess While We Move

May 25, 2010 May 25, 2010 05/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
You may have noticed that The Visual Studio Blog looks a bit different than it did last week.  Yesterday, the folks that run http://blogs.msdn.com completed the much-needed blog platform upgrade to Telligent Community 5.5.  As with most major upgrades, there were a few hitches and bugs that are still being addressed. The new URL for the ...

Visual Studio Managed Multi-Targeting: Part 1: Concepts: Target Framework Moniker, Target Framework

May 19, 2010 May 19, 2010 05/19/10
Visual Studio Blog
In prior versions of Visual Studio, before Visual Studio 2010, the projects could only target .NET Framework versions v2.0, v3.0 and v3.5 therefore it was, mostly, sufficient to identify a framework only with its version. This is changing with Visual Studio 2010 – now projects will be able to target not only current versions of the .NET ...

A guide to .vcxproj and .props file structure

May 14, 2010 May 14, 2010 05/14/10
Visual Studio Blog
If you inspect the contents of a .vcxproj file (the new VC++ project file format in VS2010) in notepad or in VS editor (by first unloading the project and then choosing "Edit Foo.vcxproj" from the context menu in Solution Explorer), you will see that the various top-level MSBuild elements are laid out in a particular order. Go ahead and open...

Announcing: Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer extension

May 13, 2010 May 13, 2010 05/13/10
Visual Studio Blog
We have received much feedback asking for a feature that would recursively collapse nodes in the solution explorer. We are happy to announce the Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer extension! What is the Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer extension? Many Visual Studio users have a solution tree structure with multiple projects and ...