VSX Conference Day 1

Our annual VSX Conference started today, the same day we officially announced and launched Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

For those who have an MSDN subscription, you can download VS 2010 Beta 2 right now.  If you don't have a subscription, the Microsoft download center will have it available on Wednesday.

Today's conference started with a keynote from Rico Mariani, our Chief Architect in VS.  As always Rico's talks are entertaining and provides a great insight to where we're going.  There were several other sessions today such as building editor extensions, an intro to extensibility, isolated shell customization, and I presented with Istvan Novak (one of our VSX Insiders) on how to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Extensions.

We covered what a VSIX is and showed the new Extension Manager bits inside of Beta 2.  For those who already have Beta 2, try downloading some of the project templates and tools that were recently uploaded the last few days.  Our first external partner (Tangible) uploaded an updated Beta 2 T4 editor this morning as well.  In addition, we updated the Source Outliner Powertoy and Power Commands.  Those have consistently been in our top 10 extensions for 2005 and 2008.

We ended the day with an "Ask the Experts" pavillion.  Our partners were also on hand to discuss their products as well.  I had several partners come up with VSIX and shell questions and ended the night getting a Cobol.Net shirt from Microfocus :)