Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center

VSX FAQ Blog created for scenario based resource references

We just created a new VSX related blog called the VSX FAQ blog.

We will be posting new entries and updating existing ones on the VSX FAQ blog as needed. We have over 100 VSX FAQ topics with links already created and currently being reviewed, so expect to find many more entries posted over the upcoming weeks.

From the introduction blog post Welcome to the VSX FAQ blog:

Welcome to the VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility) FAQ (frequently asked questions) blog, a related resource to the VSX Team blog and the VSX Developer Center.

This blog is based on the concept of using a blog (including it's RSS feed) to host a scenario based technical FAQ listing with the answers being simply links to various online resources. You can subscribe to the VSX FAQ blog RSS feed, search this blog, and filter on various topic categories.

Existing VSX FAQ blog entries will be updated as needed when new related resources are added or discovered online for relative topics. Subscribing to the RSS feed will not only assist in discovering new FAQ entries, but will also be a way of being alerted when existing FAQs have links for additional related resources.

VSX developers should feel free to post comments to any of the VSX FAQ blog entries to recommend when additional resource links should be added, or when there are issues with any of the existing links. Another option to submit feedback is to click on the Email link on this blog's home page to send an email message directly to Ken Levy (who maintains this blog).

For additional educational content around VSX, check out the VSXUE Team blog. The VSX UE (User Education) team is also known as the Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem Documentation team at Microsoft. Topics on the VSXUE Team blog are generally topic previews, walkthroughs, tutorials, and late-breaking documentation to supplement new releases of the Visual Studio SDK and the VSX community.

For technical questions to any VSX FAQ blog posts or for VSX technical questions in general, visit the VSX Forum. The VSX Forum discussions include the Visual Studio SDK, extending VS using DSL Tools, add-ins, and macros.

Visit the Visual Studio Gallery to browse a showcase of free extensions and commercial products to enhance your development experience with Visual Studio.

For additional information, resources, news, and documentation related to Visual Studio extensibility including the Visual Studio SDK, visit http://msdn.com/vsx.

VSX Community Letter for March 2008
This month's letter includes a summary of our new Visual Studio Gallery website we launched a few weeks ago, the updated VSX developer center, information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past few months, event news on VSX, some new VSX projects released, more VSX content online, and a preview of what's coming next month.

What's new with the VSX team

Our team continues to work on upcoming releases of the Visual Studio SDK for VS 2008 as well as planning around the next version of Visual Studio. We have part of our team working on the next update for the VS SDK while others work on following versions that will include more tools within the VS SDK itself. Our team is working on determining when the next release of the VS SDK will be, and we expect to know more details on that next month. We are determining if we want to release an updated VS SDK soon with very small changes or wait a bit longer to release a newer VS SDK which contains more significant enhancements.

While we work on upcoming versions of the VS SDK, we are also working reducing the size of the VS Shell runtimes. One thing we plan to ship when VS 2008 Service Pack 1 ships, is to re-release the VS Shell runtimes. The new redistributable packages will not include the actual .NET Framework 3.5 installation bits. The new VS Shell chainer feature will still automatically check for the .NET Framework 3.5 and install it as needed. This will reduce the size of the VS Shell setup by about 200 MB.

Visual Studio Gallery announced

Our team is still buzzing with enthusiasm from our recent launch of the new Visual Studio Gallery website. For additional news and announcements for the Visual Studio Gallery:

VSX Team blog: Visual Studio Gallery announced
Soma's blog (our developer division senior VP): Visual Studio Gallery
Anthony Cangialosi's blog: Welcome to the Visual Studio Gallery

Visual Studio Gallery tips

You can access the site via http://visualstudiogallery.com/, or the shorter friendly redirect http://vsgallery.com/.

Anthony Cangialosi, program manager on our VS Ecosystem team who is responsible for the Visual Studio Gallery site, has started blogging again with information and news about the new site. Recently posted on Anthony's blog was: Seeing all the VS Gallery Extensions

Just thought I would share a useful tip for the Gallery. You may find that you want to see more than the top 10 newest items or the 10 most viewed items. We'll be adding a more link to the bottom of those in the near future but in the mean time you can see this by using a trick in the search bar.

Enter a space (the actual character space with the space bar) into the search control in the upper right corner of the gallery. Then press the search button. You'll get back a list of all the extensions since all extensions will have a description with a space in it. Now sort this list by the column you are interested in, modified date, number of views, cost category, etc.

If you use the tip above and search the Visual Studio Gallery with just a single space character, you'll see we just passed 500 items listed this week, which means we are averaging about 100 new items listed on the site per week.

VSX Developer Center updated

The Visual Studio Extensibility Developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx was updated recently with a new interface similar to the one found on the VB and C# dev centers, and others. The site now has its own stand-alone center with independent navigation pages on VSX via the tabbed navigation (Library, Learn, Downloads, Support, Community). There will be additional enhancements to the site soon along with upcoming new VSX content like whitepapers, videos, samples, and more.

VSX on Channel 9

Late last month we had two videos posted on Channel 9, both interviews by Dan Fernandez:

Channel 9: Anthony Cangialosi and Ken Levy: Visual Studio Gallery

I catch up with Anthony Cangialosi and Ken Levy from the Visual Studio Extensibility team to talk about the newly launched site for finding Visual Studio extensions, www.visualstudiogallery.com. You'll also see Ken walk through using two cool, free extensions that you can download from the gallery, StickyNotes and the Source Code Outliner PowerToy.

Channel 9: Ken Levy and Aaron Marten: Visual Studio 2008 Extensibility

Ken and Aaron talk about the new features for extensibility in Visual Studio 2008 and the Visual Studio 2008 SDK including touching on key topics like:
- How you can build your own IDE with the Visual Studio Shell
- How you could create your own language service using Babel
- How to plug into editor features like IntelliSense for statement completion
- How to build your own "Hello World" tool Window

New "How Do I?" Videos for Visual Studio Extensibility

There are many new How Do I videos on VSX published, and you can subscribe to the "RSS feed for "How Do I?" videos for VS and VSX. These are great videos created by VSX developers Hilton Giesenow and Dylan Miles.

New articles on LearnVSXNow!

István Novák continues his awesome series of VSX related educational content he calls LearnVSXNow!, now with 15 VSX technical articles posted with more great educational content on the way.

DreamSpark provides Microsoft developers tools to students for free

The new Microsoft DreamSpark combined with our free Visual Studio SDK opens the door for many students to learn, use, and extend Visual Studio for free. Some additional comments from our team in Aaron Marten's blog: FREE Visual Studio 2008 for College Students via DreamSpark.

Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008

If you have created packages using the VS SDK for VS SDK 2005 and have or plan to start using the VS SDK for VS 2008, check out James Lau's blog post: Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008: A more Advanced Guide.

VSX at events

Earlier this week, Quan To and I spoke at the local .NET Developers Association user group on VSX: Extend Your Visual Studio Development Experience. The session lasted over an hour and a half we counted 59 attendees total. Quan showed how create a simple source code outliner extensions using the VS SDK. Quan has a link to the walkthrough steps for that demo and a short summary of our presentation in his blog post: VSX Talk at the .NET Developer Association weekly meeting.

If you plan to give a VSX related presentation at a conference or user group, feel free to let me know in advance so that I might mention here on the VSX team blog to help increase awareness.

VS extension tips of the month

We posted a new PowerToy called PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008, and it's already the #1 most viewed listing on the Visual Studio Gallery and the #1 download on MSDN Code Gallery (not including documentation downloads). If you downloaded the PowerCommands readme prior today, you may want to check out the updated version of the readme on the download page. The new PowerCommands utility along with Source Outliner PowerToy is a Visual Studio 2008 and StickyNotes, all ranked as the top 3 most viewed listings on the Visual Studio as of today, all make great complementary free VS IDE productivity tools.

As of today, the PowerCommands has over 5000 unique views on the Visual Studio Gallery and over 4000 downloads from MSDN Code Gallery. Feel free to post messages in the Discussions or Issue Tracker pages of the Code Gallery page to provide feedback for possible updates and future versions of PowerCommands.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more news from the team, additional VSX content online, and additional information about our upcoming version of the VS SDK for VS 2008.

Please send your feedback to us via the Contact link on any of our team member blogs, or post a technical question in the MSDN Forum for VSX. You can also email me directly at klevy@microsoft.com or using the Email link on my blog.

Ken Levy
Program Manager
Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy
http://msdn.com/vsx

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 released
PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 is now available for free download, along with source code and a readme document. PowerCommands, is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

The source code, which requires the VS SDK for VS 2008 installed, can be used to modify the exisitng PowerCommands functionality or to use as a reference sample for creating additional custom menu extensions.

PowerCommands is the type of extension for Visual Studio that contains additional command menu functions for the VS IDE that most VS developers would use regularly. Some of these cool menu commands are being considered for new IDE features in the next version of Visual Studio. PowerCommands makes a great complementary PowerToy utility to both StickyNotes and the Source Code Outliner PowerToy.

Below is a list of the included in PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 version 1.0. Refer to the Readme document which includes many additional screenshots.

Collapse Projects
This command collapses a hierarchy in the solution explorer starting from the root selected node. It can be executed from three different places: solution, solution folders and project nodes respectively.

Copy Class
This command copies a selected class entire content to the clipboard. It can be executed from a single project item or a project item with dependent sub items.

Paste Class
This command pastes a class entire content from the clipboard. It can be executed from a project or folder node.

Copy References
This command copies a reference or set of references to the clipboard. It can be executed from the references node, a single reference node or set of reference nodes.

Paste References
This command pastes a reference or set of references from the clipboard. It can be executed from different places depending on the type of project. For CSharp projects it can be executed from the references node. For Visual Basic and Website projects it can be executed from the project node.

Copy As Project Reference
This command copies a project as a project reference to the clipboard. It can be executed from a project node.

Edit Project File
This command opens the MSBuild project file for a selected project inside Visual Studio. It can be executed from a project node.

Open Containing Folder
This command opens a Windows Explorer window pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from a project item node

Open Command Prompt
This command opens a Visual Studio command prompt pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from four different places: solution, project, folder and project item nodes respectively.

Unload Projects
This command unloads all projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node.

Reload Projects
This command reloads all unloaded projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node.

Remove and Sort Usings
This command removes and sort using statements for all classes given a project. It can be executed from a solution node or a single project node.
Note: The Remove and Sort Usings feature is only available for C# projects since the C# editor implements this feature as a command in the C# editor (which this command calls for each .cs file in the project). The Visual Basic IDE implements this functionality for Imports in an interactive way: Project properties, go to the References tab, then click the Unused References... button, then select which references you want removed via a listbox.

Extract Constant
This command creates a constant definition statement for a selected text. It can be executed from the code window over a selected text.

Clear Recent File List
This command clears the Visual Studio recent file list.

Clear Recent Project List
This command clears the Visual Studio recent project list.

Transform Templates
This command executes the associated custom tool with text templates items. It can be executed from a DSL project node or a folder node.

Close All
This command closes all documents. It can be executed from a document tab.

Visual Studio Gallery announced
The Microsoft Visual Studio Ecosystem team has officially launched the new Visual Studio Gallery site at http://visualstudiogallery.com/. This new web site is a resource center for all Visual Studio extensions and includes everything from free VS PowerToys like tools to VSIP products. Any developer can post information and a link for their Visual Studio extensions. Our goal for this website is to give developers an easy way to find extensions for Visual Studio. Visual Studio extensions might include products and free applications in the form of macros, add-ins, packages, project templates, or other types of extensions to Visual Studio that are packaged up and ready to use by the developer to improve their development experience.

We would like to invite you to publish your VS extension(s) on the Visual Studio Gallery. You can just go to the website, click on the "My Account" link near the top right and sign in with your Windows Live ID to start the process. We currently do not host the actual extensions, so you can simply link to where your extension is currently hosted.

Soma blogged about the Visual Studio Gallery, he is our senior vice president for the developer division. His post includes additional details for our Visual Studio Gallery announcement today.

Also just released is a new Channel 9 video with discussions and demos: Channel 9 - Anthony Cangialosi and Ken Levy: Visual Studio Gallery

Feel free to contact me directly at klevy@microsoft.com with feedback you have on for the Visual Studio Gallery website, and be sure to include Anthony Cangialosi at anthc@microsoft.com as he is our team's program manager responsible for the Visual Studio Gallery site. We look forward to community members and partners participating in building on the Visual Studio platform resulting in an increasing list of extensions that play an important part in the overall Visual Studio ecosystem.

For more information about VSX, visit the newly updated Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center at http://msdn.com/vsx.

VSX Developer Center 2.0
The Visual Studio Extensibility Developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx has been updated with a new interface. The site now has its own stand-alone center with independent navigation pages on VSX via the tabbed navigation (Library, Learn, Downloads, Support, Community). There will be additional enhancements to the site soon along with upcoming new VSX content like whitepapers, videos, samples, and more.

The current plan is to have news about new content posted to the VSX dev center announced here on the VSX team blog, thus requiring only one RSS feed (this blog) to subscribe to for news, new content, etc. for VSX including the dev center. Feel free to provide feedback on what additional content could be linked to that exists as well as what type of new VSX content you would like to see added in the future.

Visual Studio Extensibility

Visual Studio 2008 Extensibility Overview

VSX Forum

VSX Team Blogs

Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) Program

Featured Partner