Visual Studio Blog

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

How VSIX extensions are discovered and loaded in VS 2010

VSIX is the new technology used for deploying extensions in Visual Studio 2010. The primary goal of this new technology is to encourage extension creation and consumption by easing the management (“management” meaning Browsing/Installing/Uninstalling/Enabling/Disabling) of Visual Studio extensions. To take full advantage of the VSIX ...

IntelliSense Crash in VS 2010 RC when using UI Automation

UPDATE:  There is now a patch available for this issue in the VS 2010 RC.  If you're experiencing frequent crashing when IntelliSense pops up or is dismissed, please download this patch to see whether it resolves the issue.  This bug has also been fixed for VS 2010 RTM. Shortly before the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) was ...

Visual Studio First Launch Sequence

With the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate around the corner, I would like to talk briefly about some changes we have made to the first-launch-after-installation sequence. Many of you may notice that the first time you start VS after installing, once you have selected a profile, it takes a long time for the main VS window to appear...

Visual Studio “Tip of the Day”

If you like the tips and tricks we sometimes post on this blog, you might want to check out the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks blog.  It’s written by Zain Naboulsi, a Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, and it’s devoted to these little productivity boosters.  We’ll continue to post the occasional tip here on the Visual Studio blog...

MSBuild Interview on CodeCast

I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with Ken Levy and talk about MSBuild. Ken is responsible for the CodeCast interviews at code magazine.The interview consists of an in-depth technical and scenario discussion on how and why to use MSBuild, both in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.  We also discussed new ...

How to read/write the new Visual C++ project properties

Visual C++ 2010 introduces several new project and tool properties, and deprecates some old ones.  If you’re writing a project template or Visual Studio extension that needs to programmatically read and write the new properties, you will find that these properties are not available on the standard VCConfiguration, VCCLCompilerTool, etc. set...

What’s A PkgDef? And Why?

A .pkgdef file is way to encapsulate application configuration information in an easily editable, distributable, and deployable form. It was introduced in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to support the configuration of Isolated Shell applications. In Visual Studio 2010, .pkgdef files take on a more expanded role and are much more integrated into both ...

What’s A PkgDef? And Why?

A .pkgdef file is way to encapsulate application configuration information in an easily editable, distributable, and deployable form. It was introduced in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to support the configuration of Isolated Shell applications. In Visual Studio 2010, .pkgdef files take on a more expanded role and are much more integrated into both ...