Visual Studio 2008 Extensibility Coolness

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Wondering what to do over the holidays?  Need to get away from the in-laws and relax.  Well I have just the thing for you:  cool extensibility projects for VS2008.  Yep, these projects will not only delight the senses but actually make it look like you are doing real work while you are playing.  Schweet!!!

 

 

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft

To get the upper hand playing WoW with your teenage cousins, build an add-on using the new AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, an open-source development tool that brings the Visual Studio experience to building World of Warcraft add-ons. This WoW development environment is built on the Visual Studio 2008 Shell (isolated mode). Key features include a visual design surface, Lua code editor, FrameXML IntelliSense, and auto-generation of Lua events.

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Storyboard Designer

If you're making a holiday movie of the family and need to draft out the sequence of events, check out the Storyboard Designer, a simple tool for anyone who wants to diagram (model) and generate documentation for a storyboard scenario. The Storyboard Designer provides an example of what can be accomplished by hosting DSL tools in the Visual Studio 2008 Shell (isolated mode). Watch the screencast: StoryboardDesignerDemo.

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IronPython Studio

You can also find on CodePlex a version of IronPython hosted in the Visual Studio Shell: IronPython Studio. If you're looking for version of IronPython that merges with your installation of Visual Studio (standard or above) complete with IntelliSense, compiler, debugging, etc., download the free Visual Studio SDK. The IronPython Studio is a free, standalone language tool; for more details watch the IronPython Studio screencast video demo.

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Happy Holidays

We hope these sample applications stimulate your thinking about how Visual Studio Extensibility can help you keep from getting bored stiff over the Christmas / New Year Holidays.

 

Merry Christmas!