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Getting Started with MSBuild

February 25, 2010 Feb 25, 2010 02/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
I have had several customers asking me about MSBuild and how to get started learning the language and using it. A little over a year and a half ago, I joined the MSBuild team. When I got here, I did not even know what MSBuild was, and I have been a Visual Studio user for many years. This article is to help you understand what MSBuild is, how ...

Searching and Navigating Code in Visual Studio 2010

January 13, 2010 Jan 13, 2010 01/13/10
Visual Studio Blog
Every developer knows that navigating code is vital to happy and productive coding. We’ve added several new features for code search and navigation in Visual Studio 2010, including Navigate To and an improved Call Hierarchy, to complement search staples like the Find and Replace dialog and Incremental Search. With such a wide variety of ...

Building and publishing an extension for Visual Studio 2010

December 9, 2009 Dec 9, 2009 12/9/09
Visual Studio Blog
(image) Quan To – Program Manager, Visual Studio Platform Team Short Bio: Quan is responsible for the Extension Manager and Visual Studio SDK.  Quan has been with Microsoft for over ten years and has also spent time working on the Tablet PC Team and the Visual Studio Deployment team. Visual Studio 2010 supports more ...

Bootstrapping of VS packages and VSIX extensions in VS2010

December 7, 2009 Dec 7, 2009 12/7/09
Visual Studio Blog
(image) Dmitry Goncharenko: Developer, Visual Studio Platform Short bio: Dmitry has been at Microsoft for about 10 years working on several areas of Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2010, he helped to design and implement PkgDef management, VSIX technologies, and hosting of MEF components. Visual Studio 2010 uses two technologies to make it ...

Debugging Expression Trees in Visual Studio 2010

November 19, 2009 Nov 19, 2009 11/19/09
Visual Studio Blog
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; … }. ...

Dynamic in C# 4.0: Creating Wrappers with DynamicObject

October 19, 2009 Oct 19, 2009 10/19/09
Visual Studio Blog
In the previous post I showed how you can use the new dynamic feature and the ExpandoObject class to add and remove properties at run time, and how this can make your code more readable and flexible than code written with LINQ to XML syntax. But there were some obvious flaws in that example: While ExpandoObject provided better syntax, LINQ to...

Dynamic in C# 4.0: Introducing the ExpandoObject

September 30, 2009 Sep 30, 2009 09/30/09
Visual Studio Blog
You have probably already heard about the new dynamic feature in C# 4.0 and how it is used to support COM interop. If you haven't, I strongly recommend reading the following MSDN articles: Using Type dynamic and How to: Access Office Interop Objects by Using Visual C# 2010 Features. Well, where else can you use this new feature? What are the ...

Generating Dynamic Methods with Expression Trees in Visual Studio 2010

September 14, 2009 Sep 14, 2009 09/14/09
Visual Studio Blog
Expression trees first appeared in Visual Studio 2008, where they were mainly used by LINQ providers. You can use expression trees to represent code in a tree-like format, where each node is an expression. You can also convert expression trees into compiled code and run it. This transformation enables dynamic modification of executable code as...