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Visual Studio 2010 - Visual Studio Blog

Start Extending Visual Studio 2010!

April 21, 2010 Apr 21, 2010 04/21/10
Visual Studio Blog
Visual Studio not only boasts a wide variety of tools to improve developer productivity, but it is also extremely extensible so that it can be tailored and customized to serve specifically your needs. In fact, one of the key benefits of Visual Studio 2010 is its improved extensibility story. With an easier deployment experience, more extensive...

Custom Extension Types with VSIX

April 16, 2010 Apr 16, 2010 04/16/10
Aaron Marten
DISCLAIMER: While the following technique is supported in Visual Studio 2010, the interfaces and methods exposed by Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensionManager.dll are likely to change in future Visual Studio releases. If you create an extension that relies on Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensionManager.dll, there is no guarantee that your extension ...

Tips and Tricks: Visual Studio 2010 Image Library

March 29, 2010 Mar 29, 2010 03/29/10
Visual Studio Blog
I was in the middle of creating UI mockups for some extensions I’ve been working on and realized that I needed some icons to polish off the sketch.  Sure, I could have just grabbed a screenshot of VS, opened up my favorite image editor, and pulled out the icon that I needed…but what if my “perfect” icon wasn’t in VS?  After...

Tips and Tricks: Apply (or Don’t Apply) Cut or Copy commands to blank lines

March 25, 2010 Mar 25, 2010 03/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
As you may know, Visual Studio’s cut and copy commands are useful for more than just selected text.  If you invoke them when there is no selection, VS will cut or copy your entire line, which saves you the trouble of selecting the line before adding it to the clipboard.  Although a lot of developers find this helpful, we occasionally hear ...

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 ...

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 ...

Troubleshooting Extensions with the Activity Log

February 24, 2010 Feb 24, 2010 02/24/10
Visual Studio Blog
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 ...