Vinay Ahuja : Visual Studio Extensibility

Follow up to Tampa Bay Tech Ed Outcasts

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 06:00:00 GMT

Finally I am back from Tampa. It has been a long, tiring, and certainly satisfying day. Today, I spoke on Visual Studio Extensibility in Tampa Bay Tech Ed Outcasts. I want to thank all the attendees. I enjoyed presenting and I hope the sessions were useful. The presentation slides for all the three sessions can be downloaded from here.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at vinay_a at [hotmail dot com].

How to win a ticket to TechEd?

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 18 May 2006 14:04:00 GMT

Here is the route - write an addin or VS Package and participate in the Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility Contest. If your add-in or VSPackage wins the first prize, you have the ticket to TechEd Spain with travel and accomodation.

More information on the Visual Studio Extensibility Portal. Remember the contest ends - July 31st 2006. The contest rules are here.

Atlanta Code Camp Followup

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 18 May 2006 03:00:00 GMT

Last weekend, I presented at the Atlanta Code Camp on "Extending Visual Studio 2005". This was the first time I spoke on this topic.

I talked about various ways of extending Visual Studio viz. Macros, AddIns, and Packages. I think the session went pretty well. Thanks to all the 28 people who attended this session. One surprising aspect to me was that none of the attendees had developed Macros, AddIns, or Packages before.

Macro and Add-in functionality comes packaged with Visual Studio. However, to develop Visual Studio Packages, you need to download Visual Studio SDK. The SDK is freely available to Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP Program). The affiliate membership for VSIP program is free. One can become a member by following a simple Registration process. There are three levels of membership - Affiliate, Alliance, and Premier.

The slides for the session can be downloaded from here.

To learn more about Visual Studio Extensibility, check out the following resources:

Visual Studio Extensibility Center

Visual Studio Extensibility Portal - Devx.com

MSDN - Visual Studio Extensibility

Visual Studio - Customize, Extend...Create!