Visual Studio Gallery updated!

A few months ago the Visual Studio Gallery has been announced as the one stop shop for Visual Studio Extensions. Hundreds of extensions have been added already for these several months. In case your add-in or package is still not submitted there - do that now to promote your extension absolutely for FREE!

Today Anthony Cangialosi announced a new set of needed features that will improve the appeal of the Visual studio Gallery. This update is related to possibility to rate extensions and provide a review for them. Also some improvements in searching.

Next time Anthony promised to add RSS feeds, which would be really great to see, because that will allow us to easily track all updates and new Visual Studio extensions appearing on the Gallery.

Keep in touch and happy extending!

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VSX future - will it be MEF?

Today I have noticed an interesting post in Aaron Marten blog, which is talking about Managed Extensibility Framework or just MEF. There is also some words about MEF from Krzysztof Cwalina.

Aaron assumes that this frameworks will be used for Visual Studio Extensibility platform in the future. The first version of MEF CTP June 4 2008 has been released just two days ago. As it mentioned in MEF Introduction materials:

What is MEF?

The Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF provides developers with a tool to easily add extensibility to their applications and with minimal impact on existing code. The application developer can define extension points according to the functionality required of an extension, while the extension developer uses those points to interact with the application.

MEF enables this extensibility to take place without creating a hard dependency in either direction. Applications can be extended at run time without recompilation, and extensions can be used by multiple applications sharing the same extension requirements. MEF also allows an application to delay the loading of an extension while still examining its metadata, enabling efficient traversal of large catalogs of extensions...

Maybe the next version of Visual Studio IDE will be architected with MEF.Who knows?..

Keep in touch and happy extending!

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VSX Survey (Spring 2008)

Now a new VSX Survey is available to fill out. Please take a few minutes to fill out the VSX Survey (Spring 2008). These surveys are the way we can affect to VSX team priorities and work directions.

There are 6 web pages with 23 multiple choice and fill-in-the blank questions in this survey. This is the second VSX survey, as VSX team plans to offer a similar survey every 6 months and track the trends from the results.

Keep in touch and happy extending!

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Microsoft is changing UI: VSX Forum now is red!

Last time a lot of Microsoft online resources have changed their UI. Main tendency is to move onto Vista look and feel. Most of the web sites is becoming red. So blue color is in the past, red is rocking the mountains now! :)

The pioneer was VSX Developer Center, which has been updated as part of a rollout of several developer centers on msdn.com with a new and improved layout and templates. Then the VSX Forum has been updated as well. Now it's red!

Keep in touch and happy extending!

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VSX Developers Conference 2008

The VSX Developer Conference 2008 has now been officially announced. It will be on September 15th & 16th, 2008 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington for two full days of sessions. Each day will have two session tracks presented by Microsoft product team members and industry influencers.

You will meet the VSX team and many others from Microsoft, as well as hundreds of developers from around the world who are members of the VSIP program and the VSX developer community.

A broad range of Visual Studio extensibility topics will be presented including:

• Visual Studio extensibility overview
• Future of Visual Studio
• Using the Visual Studio SDK
• Building applications based on the free Visual Studio Shell
• Programming language service integration
• Building custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools
• Team Foundation Server (TFS) extensibility
• Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) extensibility
• Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)
• And many more VSX topics!

Registration Fee: $100

Keep in touch and happy extending!

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