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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Second patch now available for IntelliSense crashes in VS 2010 RC

March 2, 2010 Mar 2, 2010 03/2/10
Visual Studio Blog
We recently blogged about a crashing bug in the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) on machines using UI Automation (UIA).  We’ve since discovered that there are actually two bugs, both of which will only affect a certain group of users but will cause the IDE to be very unstable for those users.  Both of these issues now have...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 2 : Performance tuning

March 1, 2010 Mar 1, 2010 03/1/10
Visual Studio Blog
This post, the second in a series of articles on Visual Studio 2010’s use of WPF, covers tips and techniques for optimizing performance of WPF applications, and also several areas where we needed to tune Visual Studio 2010 in order to squeeze the best out of WPF. The first post in the series covered the motivation for selecting WPF and ...

Marshal.ReleaseComObject Considered Dangerous

March 1, 2010 Mar 1, 2010 03/1/10
Visual Studio Blog
This post describes a problem we encountered and solved during the development of Visual Studio 2010 when we rewrote some components in managed code. In this post I’ll describe the problem and what we did to solve it. This is a rather lengthy technical discussion and I apologize in advance for its dryness. It’s not essential to understand ...

My Visual Studio 2008 is broken after uninstalling .NET Framework 4.0

February 26, 2010 Feb 26, 2010 02/26/10
Visual Studio Blog
  If you find out that after trying out one of the beta versions of the new Visual Studio 2010 and uninstalling it together with the .NET Framework 4 or uninstalling only .NET Framework 4, every time you try to load a project on Visual Studio 2008 you face the following error:   “Unable to read the project file ‘Project.proj...