Visual Studio Blog

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

Category : Visual Studio

Tips and Tricks: Quickly Closing Documents

March 20, 2010 Mar 20, 2010 03/20/10
Visual Studio Blog
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) (image) After (VS 2010) (image) 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.  ...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 4 : Direct Hosting of WPF content

March 15, 2010 Mar 15, 2010 03/15/10
Visual Studio Blog
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 “...

Visual Studio 2010 Text Clarity: ClearType Options

March 14, 2010 Mar 14, 2010 03/14/10
Visual Studio Blog
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 ...

Why does Visual Studio 2010 convert my projects?

March 14, 2010 Mar 14, 2010 03/14/10
Visual Studio Blog
(image) 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 ...

WPF Text Clarity Improvements

March 11, 2010 Mar 11, 2010 03/11/10
Visual Studio Blog
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 ...

Tips and Tricks: Clipboard Ring and Toolbox Snippets

March 10, 2010 Mar 10, 2010 03/10/10
Visual Studio Blog
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...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 3 : Focus and Activation

March 8, 2010 Mar 8, 2010 03/8/10
Visual Studio Blog
  Continuing the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series, today’s post is on the subject of “Focus and Activation”. Of all the problems we had to deal with in the new WPF UI, this was probably the most tricky to get right. Focus problems are notoriously hard to debug, partly because interacting with the debugger moves focus again. (Tip...

Tuning C++ build parallelism in VS2010

March 7, 2010 Mar 7, 2010 03/7/10
Visual Studio Blog
A great way to get fast builds on a multiprocessor computer is to take advantage of as much parallelism in your build as possible. If you have C++ projects, there’s two different kinds of parallelism you can configure. What are the dials I can set? Project-level parallel build, which is controlled by MSBuild, is set at the solution level in...

MSBuild 4 Detailed Build Summary

March 5, 2010 Mar 5, 2010 03/5/10
Visual Studio Blog
Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled (/clp:PerformanceSummary=true on the MSBuild command line) doesn’t give us the kind of ...

Creating and Sharing Project & Item Templates

March 4, 2010 Mar 4, 2010 03/4/10
Aaron Marten
One of the great new features we added in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to easily find and consume online Project and Item templates without leaving the New Project/Item dialog. What may not be so obvious is how to go from a piece of code you want to share to a template contained in a VSIX file that can be uploaded to the Visual Studio ...