March, 2010

This is the sixth article in the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series . This week, guest author Phil Price gives us his view of what it took to test the new WPF UI. - Paul Harrington Background This post covers an overview of techniques that we used...

I was in the middle of creating UI mockups for some extensions I’ve been working on and realized that I needed some icons to polish off the sketch.  Sure, I could have just grabbed a screenshot of VS, opened up my favorite image editor , and pulled...

As you may know, Visual Studio’s cut and copy commands are useful for more than just selected text. If you invoke them when there is no selection, VS will cut or copy your entire line, which saves you the trouble of selecting the line before adding it...

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...

For those using the Visual Studio 2010 SDK to create extensions for Visual Studio, you should find the creation and use of .pkgdef files to be mostly automatic (see What's a PkgDef and Why? ). However, like anything involving computers and software, there...

In VS 2010, we made a design decision to move the “X” from the right side of the Tab Well to within each tab. Before (VS 2008) After (VS 2010) The majority of feedback around this change was positive, but, as with most UI changes, there...

This is the fourth part in the series of posts on Visual Studio 2010’s use of WPF. This week, we’ll take a look at how Visual Studio 2010 detects and hosts WPF content ‘natively’ while at the same time allowing for non-WPF content...

Text clarity in Visual Studio 2010 has been a hot topic throughout the product cycle. Each time we talk or write about it, we seem to invite yet another round comments, some of them quite emotionally charged . We take such feedback very seriously because...

Hi, I am Richa Prasad and I am the Program Manager for the Project System team. This means that I work on many features for managing projects and solutions. One such feature is the conversion process. We have recently received many requests for making...

As most of you know, we’ve rebuilt the editor and much of Visual Studio using WPF for Visual Studio 2010. This allows for a wealth of new visualizations and enables many new extensibility scenarios, often making previously impossible tasks possible and...

I was spending some time responding to Connect bugs the other day when I ran across this suggestion : “It would be nice to have a clip board history window that could be next to the control toolbox as a nice utility window. (Often in presentations...

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...

A great way to get fast builds on a multiprocessor computer is to take advantage of as much parallelism in your build as possible. If you have C++ projects, there’s two different kinds of parallelism you can configure. What are the dials I can set...

Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled (/clp...

One of the great new features we added in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to easily find and consume online Project and Item templates without leaving the New Project/Item dialog. What may not be so obvious is how to go from a piece of code you want...

We recently blogged about a crashing bug in the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) on machines using UI Automation (UIA) . We’ve since discovered that there are actually two bugs, both of which will only affect a certain group of users but will...

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...

This post describes a problem we encountered and solved during the development of Visual Studio 2010 when we rewrote some components in managed code. In this post I’ll describe the problem and what we did to solve it. This is a rather lengthy technical...