2008 - Vol. 5 - Issue 1 - Extensibility
Special Focus issue on Visual Studio Extensibility
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Note: If you recently signed up for a subscription and are now creating a new account, please make sure to use the same email address.
Special Focus issue on Visual Studio Extensibility
Welcome Letter from the VSX Team
Doug Hodges is interviewed by Ken Levy discussing the history of the Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
In the next Visual Studio wave of products, Microsoft will distribute its world-class IDE freely via its VS 2008 Shell offerings. In this article, I will give an overview of what the Shell is, what it contains, and how you can start leveraging it to start creating your own tools IDE.
I have a funny story about how Visual Studio extensibility works. I work at Microsoft in the SQL Server division focusing on XML technologies and I went to the Visual Studio team a few years ago and asked them if they could build some better XML tools.
Extensibility in Visual Studio is a bit like science and technology-there is always more to learn and discover even for the experts. In this article, I’ll present a few tips and tricks you may find helpful when creating packages with the Visual Studio SDK.
Visual Studio is a great tool on its own and it can be extended.By using the Visual Studio SDK (VS SDK), one can create powerful extensions to fit almost any developers’ needs.
The Visual Studio SDK contains tools that make it easy to define and implement graphical Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and associated code generators in Visual Studio.The term domain-specific development refers to an approach to software development involving the use of DSLs to drive code generators. The tools contained in the Visual Studio SDK are collectively called the “DSL Tools” and use domain-specific development techniques to create and implement DSLs for use in Visual Studio. This article illustrates the domain-specific development approach through an example, and then shows how you can use the DSL Tools in the Visual Studio SDK to build the DSL used in that example.
Visual Studio provides one of the most powerful IDE’s on the market. One under-exploited aspect of this IDE is the extensibility model. Programming IDE’s are not static development tools. Development techniques, tools, and concepts change. Extensibility has been built into Visual Studio from its early inceptions. The great thing about Microsoft’s foresight is that you can augment functionality of Visual Studio yourself. This article will demonstrate how to extend the Visual Studio IDE using Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and the Visual Studio Add-In and automation models.
VSSDK Assist makes it easier to start extending Visual Studio using the Visual Studio SDK (VS SDK).
Visual Studio Extensibility can appear daunting to the uninitiated.This article will look at the blogging effort on VSSDK.com, as well as the VSMessenger sample application, and examine how they improve overall approachability to Visual Studio Extensibility.
Though the XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005 has many improvements, it still lacks support for writing and testing XPath queries. In this article, I’ll show you how to leverage the Visual Studio SDK to extend the XML Editor to allow you to write and text XPath queries in Visual Studio 2005.