In my previous post, I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script, and demonstrated it by stepping through the evaluation of a C# project. In this post, I'll keep debugging into the actual build of that project. Note that this blog is rather narrow, so some of the screenshots may be hard to see – you can click on the...
Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features were most important to them. Debugging was #1 which was very surprising to us. Thinking about it more, it makes sense. In our team we've become so proficient ourselves at reading the XML and making sense of logs that it's easy to forget how difficul...
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 information we ...
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 Gallery ...
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 some of the ...
One of the most powerful tools for troubleshooting issues that involve Visual Studio extensions is often overlooked, even though it has been around for quite some time (since VS 2005). Anyone wondering what Visual Studio is doing with their VS Package, Extension, MEF Component, or pkgdef file should ask the IDE for an activity log. In this art...
This is the first part in a seven part series. Links to the other parts are included at the bottom of this post. Now that the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2010 is publicly available, we’ve started receiving questions from inquisitive users about how Visual Studio 2010 itself was built. In particular, one questioner wanted to know if we we...
First of all, let’s take a look at the example from one of my previous posts. It creates an expression tree for calculating the factorial of a number. Now, what if you want to see the content of this tree in debug mode? You can try lambda.ToString() but it’s not very informative. All you get is this: value => {var result; … }. Basically, it te...
Weston Hutchins – Program Manager, Visual Studio Shell Team Short Bio: I started at Microsoft as an intern in 2005 and have been working in Visual Studio ever since. I’m currently a PM on the VS Shell Team. No, not the “Isolated” or “Integrated” Shell, but the core VS IDE – it’s UI and services. Prior to my current duties, I was...
Weston Hutchins – Program Manager, Visual Studio Shell Team Short Bio: I started at Microsoft as an intern in 2005 and have been working in Visual Studio ever since. I’m currently a PM on the VS Shell Team. No, not the “Isolated” or “Integrated” Shell, but the core VS IDE – it’s UI and services. Prior to my current duties, I was...
