Visual Studio Extensibility

I believe strongly in our partner strategy. In other words, I think we are in the business of building a great developer tools platform and a set of tools. I fully expect our partners to build additional tools on our platform so that between what our partners deliver and what we deliver, we provide the broadest tools offering to our developer customers.

Last week, we hosted our annual conference for developers who build on our tools platform and extend Visual Studio. This was an opportunity for product teams to educate and have a conversation with tool builders on how to integrate with our current products as well as share some of our future plans to help these partners evolve with us. For the first time, we made the conference open to all VS Extensibility developers so the general community could learn how to extend our existing technologies.

The conference was a huge success. There were over 325 registered participants representing over 125 companies including two developers of high school age! There were over 20 sessions focused on VS2008 extensibility including five sessions delivered by community speakers.

Some of the quotes we received from attendees were quite colorful and summed up the general feeling of the conference: “I received so much during this week that by figure of speech I had to rent a cargo airplane to get all the information, ideas, study material and contact data back home to Belgium. “,“I was impressed with how much information was covered.”, and “Nothing delivers the message ‘partners are important to us’ like the VSIP Summit.” It is great to hear that these partners are getting what they need from the product teams. We know that our success depends on the success of our partners and developers in general.

Some of the sessions were recorded as screencasts and will be available next week online from the VSX Dev Center.

Namaste!