Visual Studio Blog

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

Using Visual Studio to build VB Windows Phone Applications

by Yang Xiao Today we are announcing the release to web (RTW) of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This walkthrough demonstrates how easy and convenient it is to develop a VB Windows Phone application using the newly released tools. You’ll see that the many new IDE features in Visual Studio 2010, which help you navigate and ...

Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Start Page – Part 2

This is the second of a two part walkthrough on creating a personalized version of the Start Page which enables users to change a background image. This post builds on the project we created previously. If you have not already done so, I recommend going through part one of the walkthrough before continuing on. We will cover the following ...

Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Start Page – Part 1

One of the coolest features of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to customize the new WPF based Start Page. We have released a project template for creating pages, using the Visual Studio 2010 default page as a starting point. In the next two posts I’m going to walk through the process of creating a new page, testing the page using the VS...

Building on Cross targeting scenarios and 64-bit MSBuild

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...

Custom Extension Types with VSIX

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 ...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 5 : Window Management

This is the fifth article in the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series. This week, guest author Matthew Johnson presents a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Visual Studio's innovative window management system. - Paul Harrington Background Several people have expressed interest in how much effort was required to write a WPF window management ...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 3 : Focus and Activation

  Continuing the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series, today’s post is on the subject of “Focus and Activation”. Of all the problems we had to deal with in the new WPF UI, this was probably the most tricky to get right. Focus problems are notoriously hard to debug, partly because interacting with the debugger moves focus again. (Tip...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 2 : Performance tuning

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 ...

MSBuild Task Factories: guest starring Windows Powershell

One of the cool new features of MSBuild 4.0 is the extensible task factory.  Task factories allow you to include scripts directly in your project file (or an imported .targets file) and have those scripts parsed and executed by your favorite interpreter.  Those scripts might even be C# or VB.NET code snippets that get compiled into ...