VSX Community Letter for February 2008

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This month's letter includes information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past few months, event news on VSX, some new VSX projects released, more VSX content online, and a preview of what's coming next month.

What's new with the VSX team

Our team continues to work on the next release of the Visual Studio SDK for VS 2008 as well as planning around the next version of Visual Studio. For some recent important technical news for the current VS SDK version, check out Known Issues for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0. For our future VS SDK versions, we will be using a much more model/designer driven approach to creating VS extensions. We will post more details about that once we get farther along in our design and planning process.

We will have some significant news around VSX and VS extensions to announce later this month, so stay tuned to our team blog here and the March community letter next month to summarize the various details.

VSX team member blogs

Below is a list of our various team member blogs, and also check out Terry Clancy's blog focused on VSIP and VSTS related topics.

VSX Webcasts online

We have three new VSX related MSDN webcasts now online from the VSX team, see VSX webcasts available on demand: VSX, VS Shell, and DSL Tools. You can watch online or download the video, each are about one hour long.

We have also posted many full webcasts from presentations from our team at recent events including our VSIP Summit conference and TechEd Europe a few months ago. We will have a formal place for these video downloads on the msdn.com/vsx developer center later this month when we launch our new and improved VSX developer center. Note: You can launch these files by clicking on the link or right click on the link and select Save Target As... to download the WMV file locally.

VSX at events

In January, some of our team members (Anthony Cangialosi, Quan To, and I) presented a VSX session at the Seattle Code Camp on January 26-27 in Redmond, WA. Much of the content in that session is in the various VSX webcasts recently posted online in slides and videos, and we plan to post additional screencast and webcast demos in the near future.

Earlier this week we hosted one of our VSIP Clinic events with many of our VSIP partners visiting here in Redmond. You can find more information about various VSIP events at VSIP Program Benefits.

We will be presenting a VSX session on Monday March 10th at the Seattle .NET User group, part of the .NET Developer Association, which meets in Redmond, WA on the Microsoft main campus in building 40.

If you plan to give a VSX related presentation at a conference or user group, feel free to let me know in advance so that I might mention here on the VSX team blog to help increase awareness.

Upcoming Visual Studio Extensibility book

There’s a cool new book to release in March, Visual Studio Extensibility book from Wrox by author Keyvan Nayyeri. It is also available via amazon.com.

Determined to make the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) learning process as smooth as possible, this helpful resource shows you how to use VSX in order to facilitate easier development of Microsoft programming languages and development technologies. Keyvan Nayyeri examines how VSX simplifies the processes of coding, compilation, deployment, debugging, and testing. Plus, numerous examples, sample code, and real-world case studies demonstrate the various extensibility options of VSX so that you can perform routine tasks easier and quicker.

VS extension tips of the month

An updated version of Source Code Outliner PowerToy for Visual Studio 2008 is now available for free download as a great extension for Visual Studio 2008 (Standard versions and above). There is an MSI binary install download and the source code is available on CodePlex, now with Visual Basic source code as well as in C#.

Check out StickyNotes available for Visual Studio 2008 on new MSDN Code Gallery. With StickyNotes, you can save notes associated with a particular project for reminders as bugs to fix, features to add, areas to test, etc.

MSDN Code Gallery

In case you missed the announcement early this week, check out Soma's blog post MSDN Code Gallery - snippets, samples and resources about the new MSDN Code Gallery at https://code.msdn.com.

Next month

In next month's letter, we will have more team news, VSX content online, and more information about our upcoming next release of the VS SDK for VS 2008.

Please send your feedback to us via the Contact link on any of our team member blogs, or post a technical question in the MSDN Forum for VSX. You can also email me directly at klevy@microsoft.com or using the Email link on my blog.

Ken Levy
Program Manager
Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem
Microsoft
https://blogs.msdn.com/klevy
https://msdn.com/vsx