User Interface Design Guidelines

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The Visual Studio SDK includes user interface (UI) guidelines so that developers can match the UI of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

An IDE must provide users a consistent, predictable UI. A standard UI provides a seamless user experience, shortens learning curves, and lowers the total cost of ownership. The Visual Studio IDE enables flexible design of VSPackage interfaces. UI design guidelines offer a framework for uniformly designing and implementing interface technologies into the IDE.

Visual Studio UI guidelines are located in Visual Studio SDK installation path\VisualStudioIntegration\ExtraDocumentation\Visual Studio 2005 User Experience Guidelines.mht.

Note

These guidelines address UI design standards for Visual Studio 2005 and do not represent a comprehensive UI design reference. For more complete guidelines on designing and implementing the Windows UI, see The Windows User Experience in the MSDN Library.