Visual Studio Blog

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

Node.js - Visual Studio Blog

MSBuild Known Issues

July 15, 2010 Jul 15, 2010 07/15/10
Visual Studio Blog
Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which can be traced back to issues with MSBuild.  We’ve analyzed all of these and there are several particular cases where a crash can occur.  We’ve also added a notification to Windows Error Reporting to help guide those who hit ...

Walkthrough– Publishing an Extensibility Web Control Project Template (Part 2 of 2)

June 1, 2010 Jun 1, 2010 06/1/10
Visual Studio Blog
Introduction In Walkthrough-- Publishing a Custom Web Control (Part 1 of 2) you learned to create and publish a custom web control. You created the extensibility project manually, a procedure with many steps. Now that you have an extensibility project template, you can publish it to the Visual Studio gallery. Anyone who wants to create and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Building on Cross targeting scenarios and 64-bit MSBuild

May 7, 2010 May 7, 2010 05/7/10
Visual Studio Blog
UPDATE: Most issues around MSBuild support for cross-bitness and 64-bit builds are fixed in .NET 4.5. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect.   During the Visual Studio 2010 development cycle a push to make the build experience better on Cross compilation...

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 ...