What's New in VSIP 2005

  • Article

The Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) SDK 2005 now known as the Visual Studio 2005 SDK will ship with many new and enhanced features.

  • Visual Studio packages (VSPackages) can be programmed to allow users to save and retrieve their settings by using the Export/Import user settings mechanism of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).
  • COM interop is provided for the Visual Studio Debugging SDK.
  • The new Data Designer Extensibility (DDEX) SDK provides documentation, samples, and resources to help you implement a DDEX provider for exposing third-party data source objects in Visual Studio. DDEX providers allow you to expose objects derived from virtually any data source.
  • The Visual Studio Environment SDK now provides managed code classes that make it easy for you to write VSPackages and projects. For more information, see What's New in the Environment SDK?.
  • Language services (which supply features such as syntax highlighting and IntelliSense support) can now be created in managed code with the managed package framework. For more information, see Language Service in the Managed Package Framework.
  • The Visual Studio automation models give you the ability to easily extend and automate the Visual Studio environment, such as tool windows, projects and solutions, and the editor. For more information, see What's New in Extensibility and Automation in Visual Studio 2005.
  • Source control can now be integrated into Visual Studio as a VSPackage, which allows the source control package to control the entire user interface for source control. For more information, see Creating a Source Control Package.
  • To facilitate the process of integrating your own Help collection with the Visual Studio combined collection, a new Help Integration Wizard is provided. For more information see Help Integration Wizard and How To: Integrate a Help Collection with Visual Studio. The Microsoft.VisualStudio.VSHelp.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.VSHelp80.dll supply many public help integration interfaces available to VSPackages. These .dll-files are not yet documented, but can be found in <installation root>\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv and can be viewed in the Object Browser.

Most of these features are available in the Beta 2 release of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK.