Soma posted a high level overview about building extensions and referenced my blog post on our team blog.

Check out those posts and try out the walkthrough if you want to build a Visual Studio 2010 extension.

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 :)

Check it out on Channel 9 at:

https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/cgranger/The-VS2010-Extension-Manager/

Steven Wilssens, our main PM working on the gallery sums up the changes below:

Feature Highlights

· Referrals Count – During our initial release we only counted the number of downloads for contributions with a payload. With this release we will be counting the number of click-throughs for projects with a referral link.

· Updated Details Page: Based on customer feedback we changed the layout of the details page.

· Support for integration with https://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio: We added an xml files that allows https://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio to display the recently added, highest rated, and most active contributions on Visual Studio Gallery.

· Notifications - Users now receive a notification when someone gives a rating, starts or replies to a discussion thread for their project, etc.

· Performance Increase – The overall site performance has increased significantly with this release thanks to changes that are shared across the Expression Gallery, Visual Studio Gallery, and CodePlex sites.

We’re targeting a regular cadence of updates on the Gallery.  If you have any feedback for us, feel free to post them to our Gallery forum.

Congrats to the MSDN team for a smooth update earlier today and I’m really happy with the performance improvements!

-Quan

Full support will be available in Beta 2.

Step 1: Build your toolbox control, test it, and verify it.

Step 2: Create a new VSIX Project by launching the New Project dialog, select C#, Extensibility, and pick the VSIX Project in the middle pane

Step 3: In your VSIX Project, add the files related to your toolbox control.  You can do this using the Add New Item content menu.

Step 4:

Create a new .pkgdef file and add it as an item to your project.  The .pkgdef file should be named <YourProject>.pkgdef and it should contain the following info:

[$RootKey$\ToolboxControlsInstaller\WinControl, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1631b3e7a8fbcce5, processorArchitecture=MSIL]
@="Litware Controls"
"Codebase"="$PackageFolder$\WinControl.dll"

Change the WinControl, Version…. part to match the assembly name of your control.  This must be an exact match.

Change the @ property to the name of your control.

Change the Codebase property to point to your DLL.  This is assuming the DLL is in the root of the VSIX, which ends up being installed to the $PackageFolder$ directory on disk.

If you're building a WPF Control, you'll need to add one additional key/value pair:      "WPFControls"="1"

Add that in your pkgdef file below your codebase statement.

Step 5:

For all the additional files you added to your VSIX project, select each one, go to the property grid and mark the “Copy To Output” item to “Copy always”

There’s an SDK bug that you will also need to mark the image files as well as “Copy always”.  These are the VSIXProject_Large.png and VSIXProject_Small.png.

Step 6:

Open the VSIX Manifest and modify it to add your own unique ID, company name, version, etc.

In the Content section, click on the drop down and Select VS Package.  In the column beside it, type in the name of your pkgdef file.

Don’t forget to Save your changes.

Step 7:

Build.

Once you finish building, you’ll see a VSIX file in your output directory.

Step 8:

Test your extension by double clicking on the VSIX file to install it. 

You’ll need to restart VS.

Step 9:

Verify your control shows up in the Extension Manager and in the Toolbox Control.

And that’s it.  You’ve successfully created a VSIX package for your control.

Now go ahead and share it with the world on the Visual Studio Gallery!

https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-on-C9-VS-2010-Beta-1-Windows-API-Code-Pack--a-WPF-Jukebox/

Dan and Brian talk about several new VS 2010 Beta 1 features including the Extension Manager, PLKs and the Integrated and Isolated Shells, and other new features and changes in the product.

This blog gets a shout out in the video :)

I've been asked this several times from partners and customers and I've gotten different responses asking the same question to other folks in the developer division.  Atleast Rico has put into perspective why we're not moving in that direction at this time.

This is definitely worth a few minutes to read:

https://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx

I demo'ed the Extension Manager and SDK to Jason Zander (my boss' boss' boss' boss) a few weeks back.  He was aware of the feature and showed it at a few of his own demos but saw the end to end demo for the first time during my demo.  I'm glad he loved it and although there's still work for us, we're definnitely heading in the right direction.

You can read Jason's blog from here:

https://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/06/01/visual-studio-2010-sdk-beta-1-is-now-live.aspx

After you've read it, go build your own extension and share it with the world! :)

Problem:

When I try installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK, it crashes when I click Next during the setup process.

Reason:

This is a tad embarassing.  When we cleaned up our installer from Visual Studio 2008 SDK SP1, we removed some strings related to blocking the SP1 install if the RTM SDK was present.  The problem is we didn't remove the check itself.  If you have the VS 2008 SDK RTM and then try installing the 2010 Beta 1 SDK, one of our checks fire and then tries to get the help text to tell you to remove the older SDK.  Since we removed the string, the resource returned is null and the strng formatter chokes and throws an exception, causing the setup to crash.  We've gone ahead and fixed this but unfortunately, it was found after we released the Beta 1 SDK.

Workaround:

The workaround is pretty simple and you have two options.

1) Uninstall the VS 2008 RTM SDK (and update to SP1)

2) Extract the setup exe and launch the MSI directly:

The shells are still work in progress as we made some changes since VS 2008 SP1.  Both shells will have all the new goodness that came with VS 2010 including the WPF UI and feature updates to the web components, a brand new MEF based Editor, along with xcopy pkgdef support.  Another big change was we moved the shell setup to use the same setup engine as the main VS product.

You can download and try out the shells from here:

Integrated Shell: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ee907896-e8f4-4378-9405-2593ddb38376&displaylang=en

Isolated Shell: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=308b82aa-39f9-456e-b6d7-5d348b6f7015&displaylang=en

To create extensions that work on the shell, you'll need to also get the Visual Studio 2010. (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=147422)

You'll also notice the Shells are a lot bigger than what we shipped in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.  We're carrying both the 3.5 and 4.0 .NET Framework redist packages inside the shells at this time.  This will be fixed in Beta 2 as we remove those and replace them with the small web download for the Frameworks which will reduce the shell redist sizes back to the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 levels (120-150 MB).