Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Quick Access Extension

With last week’s release of the Productivity Power Tools, we announced a new extension – Quick Access – that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE.  You can launch Quick Access by pressing Ctrl+3, or by selecting View->Quick Access. Quick Access will allow you to search and execute...

Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Start Page – Part 2

This is the second of a two part walkthrough on creating a personalized version of the Start Page which enables users to change a background image. This post builds on the project we created previously. If you have not already done so, I recommend going through part one of the walkthrough before continuing on. We will cover the following ...

Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Start Page – Part 1

One of the coolest features of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to customize the new WPF based Start Page. We have released a project template for creating pages, using the Visual Studio 2010 default page as a starting point. In the next two posts I’m going to walk through the process of creating a new page, testing the page using the VS...

Fixes for Solution Navigator & Quick Access in the Productivity Power Tools

Last week, we released the July 2010 version of the Productivity Power Tools which introduced the Solution Navigator, Quick Access, Automatic Brace Completion and Tools Options support. We've been really excited to see nearly 40,000 downloads last week and the hundreds of pieces of feedback that you have sent us. Based on that feedback, we ...

Announcing the Solution Navigator

We are very excited to announce the first release of Solution Navigator, a new tool that merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References into a single view. This view can be surfaced as a tool window or, for C# and VB, an interactive tooltip. The Solution ...

New Version of the Productivity Power Tools is Available!

I am pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the Productivity Power Tools.  With this release, we've introduced 4 brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version.  If you have the Productivity Power Tools installed already, you will get a notification that a new version is ...

MSBuild Known Issues

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which can be traced back to issues with MSBuild.  We’ve analyzed all of these and there are several particular cases where a crash can occur.  We’ve also added a notification to Windows Error Reporting to help guide those who hit ...