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...

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...

Last week, we released the July 2010 version of the Productivity Power Tools which introduced the Solution Navigator, Quick Access, Automatic Brace Completion and Tools Options support. We've been really excited to see nearly 40,000 downloads last week...

We are very excited to announce the first release of Solution Navigator, a new tool that merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References into a single view. This view can...

I am pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the Productivity Power Tools. With this release, we've introduced 4 brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version. If you have the Productivity...

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which can be traced back to issues with MSBuild.  We’ve analyzed all of these and there are several particular cases where a crash can occur.  We’ve...

In my last two posts ( here and here ) I showed how to enable the unsupported MSBuild debugger to debug a build started on the command line with MSBuild.exe. In this final post, I'll mention some other variations. Note that this blog is rather narrow...

In my previous post , I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script, and demonstrated it by stepping through the evaluation of a C# project. In this post, I'll keep debugging into the actual build of that project. Note that...

Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features were most important to them. Debugging was #1 which was very surprising to us. Thinking about it more, it makes sense. In our team we've become so proficient...

The Visual Studio team has sponsored a set of Visual Studio Extensibility walkthroughs that will be hosted on www.devx.com .  The first walkthrough showed how to write a blogging extension for VS 2010 and demonstrated the basics of VSPackages, Commands...

Recently I’ve been helping plan the next version of Visual Studio. It’s way too early to be talking about specifics, but one topic came up this week that I have to share. Package Authoring As some of you may have noticed, many of...

If you're experiencing frequent “insufficient memory” errors when doing small cut or copy operations in Visual Studio 2010 RTM, please download this patch to see whether it resolves the issue. What are the symptoms of this bug? Attempting...

Two weeks ago, we launched the Productivity Power Tools at TechEd North America and the response has been great with over 37000 downloads so far! Many of you also may have noticed that an updated version of the Power Tools was released last week. This...

[ Update 7/20/2010 ]: Updated changes made for version 10.0.10710.22 of the Pro Power Tools. Please take a look at the changelog . A couple of posts ago I announced the availability of Document Well 2010 Plus as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Pro...

UPDATE: This issue is 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 . Recently, we’ve seen a number of people reporting problems with resource generation...

  Hi, I’m Ryan Molden, a developer on the Shell team.  Due to popular feedback from users I have been reassigned to a top-secret UI project.  I can’t say much about it, just give you a quick sneak peek.     No wait, that’s not...

[ Update 6/21/2010 ]: Please go to this blog post where I describe even more configuration options that are available for this extension. [ Update 7/20/2010 ]: Updated changes made for version 10.0.10710.22 of the Pro Power Tools. Please take a look at...

This post is about a new way to install extensions to Visual Studio, introduced in VS 2010, called the VSIX file. The information it contains will be of most interest to readers who develop Visual Studio extensions, but I encourage users who download...

The sunset in Seattle was spectacular this evening. My wife and I climbed the water tower in Volunteer Park to look across the Sound as the sun dipped behind the Olympic mountains and, in the space of a few minutes, the sky turned from blue to orange...

Introduction In MSBuild 4 we introduced several performance improvements, particular for large interdependent builds.  By and large they are automatic and you receive their benefit without making any changes to the way your build process in authored...

Introduction In Walkthrough-- Publishing a Custom Web Control (Part 1 of 2) you learned to create and publish a custom web control. You created the extensibility project manually, a procedure with many steps. Now that you have an extensibility project...

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...