May, 2010

Now that we have gone through some key concepts in the previous part in this series, before we go any further in terms of detailed technical concepts, it would be nice to have some “mental visual model” of how multi-targeting impacts almost...

Build Customizations (Custom Build Rules in earlier editions) are commonly used for invoking external tools that translate files from one format to the other, often resulting in C++ sources that can be compiled at the C++ compilation step. In this post...

You may have noticed that The Visual Studio Blog looks a bit different than it did last week.  Yesterday, the folks that run http://blogs.msdn.com completed the much-needed blog platform upgrade to Telligent Community 5.5.  As with most major...

The Visual Studio 2010 SDK adds several project templates to Visual Studio that let you create and share custom controls. These are called extensibility projects. In addition to compiling the control, the extensibility project prepares it for publication...

In prior versions of Visual Studio, before Visual Studio 2010, the projects could only target .NET Framework versions v2.0, v3.0 and v3.5 therefore it was, mostly, sufficient to identify a framework only with its version. This is changing with Visual...

This post describes three new features that have been added to the Managed Package Framework (MPF) version 10.0 in Visual Studio 2010. These features are available to anyone developing extensions in managed code for Visual Studio 2010. To get started...

If you inspect the contents of a .vcxproj file (the new VC++ project file format in VS2010) in notepad or in VS editor (by first unloading the project and then choosing "Edit Foo.vcxproj" from the context menu in Solution Explorer), you will see that...

We have received much feedback asking for a feature that would recursively collapse nodes in the solution explorer. We are happy to announce the Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer extension! What is the Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer...

Like the project templates installed with Visual Studio, online project templates enable people to easily start creating various applications. It’s not just Microsoft that creates these templates -- anyone can create an online template and publish it...

Assembly references are an integral part of build process. When the assembly references passed to the compiler are correct everything works but when they are not projects stop building.  When this happens It can be frustrating to try and figure out...

Some customers have been reporting intermittent crashes while using Visual Studio 2010, particularly during file save and build. We haven’t tracked this down completely yet, but many of the crashes seem to be related to an out-of-date version of the AnkhSVN...

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...

With the release of Visual Studio 2010 came a major improvement to the overall extensibility story of Visual Studio; the new editor. With the new editor VS was introduced to a Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) based API that opened up possibilities...

Some more information about this 4.0 feature. (I've also updated the first post with this, so everything's in one place for your reference.) Built-in MSBuild functions The full list of built-in [MSBuild] functions, like the one above, are in the MSDN...