VSX DevCon Sessions Posted

If you haven't heard already, we are hosting the first-ever public VSX conference from September 15-16 on the main Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. The conference is focused entirely on Visual Studio Extensibility and will present a good mix of introductory and advanced topics. You will get a chance to meet the folks who work on Visual Studio in the conference.

Since this is our first year hosting this conference, we are having an introductory price of $100 for registration!

We have just posted some session details on the conference web site.

VSX Futures

Speaker: Rico Mariani (Principal Architect, Microsoft)
Rico Mariani, Architect for the Visual Studio Platform team shares his ideas and long term goals for Visual Studio.  Learn how industry trends are changing the way you will develop software and how Visual Studio will lead the way.

VS Extensibility Architecture: Intro & Advanced Topics (2 Sessions)

Speaker: Douglas Hodges (Principal Architect, Microsoft)
Extending the Visual Studio (VS) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) using the VS Package Architecture. For integrating commercial products, supporting new languages and participating as a 1st class citizen within the IDE, Visual Studio’s service and windowing architecture is exposed through a package model. Learn about building your own package and integrating with other services and packages within the environment in this 2 part session presented by one of Visual Studio’s original architects.

Hobby To Profit – How to Market Your Extensions

Speaker: Joe Marini (Director, Microsoft)
Have you been thinking about how you might be able take your Visual Studio Extension from a free download to a profitable product?  Microsoft has a variety of resources that supports the ecosystem of VSX developers.  From the free Visual Studio Gallery to the co-marketing benefits that come with being a member of the VSIP program you'll learn about the various ways to take advantage of what Microsoft has to offer.

Apples and Oranges or Fruit Salad? A Look at Open Source Versus Commercial Platform Strategies

Speaker: Tim Wagner (Development Lead, Microsoft)
The speaker, a former Eclipse Web Tool Platform Project lead now working with the Microsoft Visual Studio Platform team, takes a look at the differences and (surprising) similarities of the Eclipse platform strategy and that of Visual Studio. The talk examines licensing and pricing models and how choices for the platform affect both end user adoption and add-in provider opportunities. Deep focus by the Eclipse Foundation on enabling add-in providers through EPIC and other mechanisms bears a strong similarity to the way large commercial vendors such as Microsoft build partner programs, including marketing support, lead generation, and other conventional business activities. Recent changes by the Visual Studio Ecosystem team to make the platform easier to extend and adopt are clearly informed by success in the open source world and are evolving to look increasingly like it. We will also examine membership pricing and look at the impact different membership classes (such as Strategic Developers in Eclipse and Premier Partners in Visual Studio) affect the course of the platform and its tools. Finally, we'll take a brief look at innovation drivers and rates of change in an attempt to answer the question of how (and whether) open versus commercial development affects the evolution of the underlying platform.

Building Custom Tools with Visual Studio 2008 Shell

Speaker: James Lau (Lead Program Manager, Microsoft)
Do you want to consolidate your organization’s software tools into a single environment for either internal or external use? Do you want to create an integrated vertical market toolset inside a world-class IDE? If your answer is yes to either of the above, you need to learn more about the Visual Studio Shell product.  Visual Studio Shell is a new offering in Visual Studio 2008. With this new product, tools developers can now easily build their own customized IDE on the same platform that Visual Studio is built on; royalty free. Whether your customers are looking to build an “Express” edition of their programming language products, or they you want to build an IDE for specialized controls systems, the Visual Studio Shell can help them you cut cost and focus on their your areas of expertise. In this session, we will walk through how to build a custom IDE with the Shell. You will walk away inspired to build your own IDE on this new platform!

The VSXtra community project: Driving toward a new Visual Studio Managed Package Framework

Speaker: Istvan Novak (VSX Insider, Grepton Informatics)
Visual Studio package development with VS SDK 2008 is easier than ever before. Starting a new VSPackage is quite easy using the Visual Studio Integration Package wizard and the Managed Package Framework. However, when going into coding developers have to face with COM-related types and interfaces too often. It’s a kind of schizophrenic state to work in .NET using COM-driven approach and dealing with plumbing too much.

In my session I introduce you the current state and results of an experimental community project codenamed “VSXtra” (https://www.codeplex.com/VSXtra). This project enumerates many patterns that drive toward a new and improved Managed Package Framework using the great pillars of the current .NET Framework like metadata, generics, LINQ, C#3.0 syntax, etc. The aim of this session is to share my thoughts with you, open my ears for your feedback and widen the community around improving VSX development experience.

Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools

Speaker: Gareth Jones (Senior Software Developer, Microsoft)
Domain-Specific Language Models are a powerful technique for embodying in a tool the abstractions specific to the software your business is building and guidance on how to use them with your own frameworks.   In this session we will  examine the domain-specific development pattern, and see how to build a simple graphical language from scratch. You will also learn how to make your graphical language domain-specific and finally how to add architectural guidance directly to the tool.

Extending ASP.NET MVC with Custom HTML Helpers   

Speaker: Stephen Walther (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)
Microsoft ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft's newest framework for building agile, loosely coupled, highly testable web applications. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, but not a replacement, for the current ASP.NET Web Forms Framework. Because ASP.NET MVC is a new framework, there are exciting opportunities for creating new extensions to the underlying framework. In this talk, you learn how to create new HTML Helpers for ASP.NET MVC. An HTML Helper is the equivalent of an ASP.NET control in the new world of ASP.NET MVC. 

Deploying VSX Projects              

Speaker: Aaron Marten (Software Developer, Microsoft)
This talk covers distributing various Visual Studio Extensibility components. Whether you are shipping a VSPackage, Add-in, Project Template, or Toolbox Control, check out this webcast for tips and tricks and to avoid common pitfalls with deploying your Visual Studio extensions, including several demos for these topics

How I Extend Visual Studio              

Speaker: Members of the VSX Community
Members of the Visual Studio community will share just how they leverage Visual Studio to deliver valuable products for their customers and make their development process more productive. You’ll see demos & presentations from a variety partners & community members in a fast paced fun session.

Visual Studio 2008: How to integrate a Debugger into Visual Studio
Speaker: TBD

Extensibility points in Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server
Speaker: TBD

Extensibility points in Visual Studio 2008 Team System
Speaker: TBD

10 Ways to Extend VS and become a more Productive Developer
Speaker: TBD

This is not the complete list! We are going to make updates over the next couple of weeks continuously. So check back often.

If you haven't registered yet, you can click on the big orange button below to register for the event.

 

If you are a VSIP partner, you should use this link to register instead. If you have any questions about this conference, you can contact us at vsxconf@microsoft.com.

 

Cheers,

James Lau
Lead Program Manager, VSX Team