VSIP Dev Lab

We just completed another Dev Lab on the Microsoft campus.  This is an event for partners to bring their VS integrations on campus and have Microsoft help them get their code working with the latest platforms.

In this case we have several partners that are getting ready to launch their integrated tools when we launch VS 2005 later this year.

For me, it was a hectic time since I had just returned from a road-trip vacation in Califorinia the week before and had 2 presentations to give during the week.

I returned home on Friday night (late) and worked over the weekend for my Monday morning presentation.  Then I worked on my second presentation on Monday and Tuesday.  On Wednesday morning I gave that presentation.  I was much more relaxed after having given that final presentation.

The first presentation was kind of a Sprint review over the last few Sprints to get direct customer feedback and what should be in the VS SDK.  I showed the Product Backlog and demo'd some of the new samples in the SDK.  We got a lot of good feedback that we will immediately begin taking action on to give customers what they asked for.  Some of the same information is already public on the VSIPDev.com site.

The second presentation I delivered was a dry-run of a presentation I'm giving at PDC in Sept for the Visual Studio Extensiblity Pre-conference Session.  (By the way the PDC is sold-out.)  This presentation was a walk-through of the Managed Package Framework and I spent a great deal of time during the session writing code demonstrating an integration that took advantage of the strengths of the managed packge framework. 

The integration that I wrote on stage was a To-Do Manager tool that used a Tool Window, the Property Browser, Task List, Tool/Options Dialog all in a Windows Form.  Pretty cool.  I will be blogging more about that project since it revealed a few technical areas that need some explanation and I had to come up with a workaround or two to some limitations in VS and the Managed Package Framework.

By the way, our August Sprint is coming to a close and we'll likely be providing a preview of the VS SDK as a result with some of the newest sample code.  In addition to the reference samples for C# Package and C# MenuAndCommands from last month, we've added following reference samples: C++ Package, C++ MenuAndCommands and C# Services.  We're still working on that last 3 on our list C++ Tool Window, C# Tool Window and C++ Services.

I'll be blogging more about the VS SDK in the future as well.