In previous previews of Visual Studio 2010 the process started with you taking a copy of the default start page (ie StartPage.xaml) from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\StartPages\en. Unfortunately this file no longer exists. Instead in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft has compiled the start page xaml into baml and embedded it into an assembly somewhere.

I figured, no problems, I’ll just start with the code sample that we already had working. Of course, there are missing and broken references. Even after fixing some of the references I noticed that the styling wasn’t the same as the default start page, so they must have added some polish to the start page since the code sample for the book was generated. I then decided to look further into where the start page had been placed. There were a number of dlls that I thought to be likely candidates for the start page:

• Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.10.0
• Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.UI.Internal
• Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.StartPage

Turns out it’s not in any of these assemblies (although it does reference controls and components from these assemblies as we’ll see later on). It’s located in Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.UI.Internal.resources.dll. I used RedGate’s .NET Reflector (http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector) to trawl through these assemblies looking for start page references.

Now the challenge was that the start page has been compiled to baml – essentially a binary form of the xaml file. Luckily there is an awesome addin for Reflector called the BamlViewer that is available from CodePlex (http://reflectoraddins.codeplex.com/releases/view/1805). Download the addin and then go to View>Add-Ins to add the BamlViewer assembly to the list of addins.

Next, from the Tools menu select BamlViewer (only appears after the addin has been correctly registered). Locate the resource that you want to view, in this case StartPage.baml, and hey presto, there’s the xaml you’re after.

You can copy the xaml into a file called StartPage.xaml and then add this file into an empty WPF project. You’ll see that there are a bunch of references that you need to add – these are listed in the Grid element where it imports the namespaces:

<Grid xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation 
xmlns:x=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml
xmlns:sp=”clr-namespace:Microsoft.VisualStudio.PlatformUI;assembly=Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.StartPage”
xmlns:vs=”clr-namespace:Microsoft.VisualStudio.PlatformUI;assembly=Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.10.0″ xmlns:vsfx=”clr-namespace:Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.10.0″ xmlns:d=http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008
xmlns:mc=”http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006″>

Make sure you add references to all of these assemblies – some are in the GAC, some of them you’ll need to locate under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE. There are some other minor breakages that require a bit of tweaking – these are a result of the BamlViewer not quite getting the XAML correct that it generates (I’ve attached all the files to this blog post). The end result should be that you have a XAML page that will open in the designer of Visual Studio 2010. As you can see in the following image, the design experience doesn’t look the same as when the actual start page renders within Visual Studio 2010.

Now, to get your Start Page to display – Open the Options dialog (Tools menu), locate the Startup node under Environment and change the Customize Start Page to show your start page. Note that the xaml and csproj file have to be located under \Documents\Visual Studio 2010\StartPages for them to be available in the drop down list.

Restart Visual Studio and open the Start Page and you should see your custom page (although at this point it should appear the same as the default page).

Let’s add an additional tab to the start page. Open up StartPage.xaml and go to the end of the file. After the last closing TabItem tag add another TabItem element. For example the following code adds a Company tab (in bold).

            </TabItem>
            <!– Company Tab –>
            <TabItem Header=”Company”
                                     Style=”{DynamicResource StartPage.TabItemStyle}”
                                    x:Uid=”Company_Tab” >
               <Grid>
                  <Grid.RowDefinitions>
                     <RowDefinition Height=”Auto”></RowDefinition>
                     <RowDefinition Height=”*”></RowDefinition>
                  </Grid.RowDefinitions>
                  <TextBlock Foreground=”#E8E8E8″ 
                                              Margin=”15″ TextWrapping=”Wrap”
                                             x:Uid=”Information_Paragraph” > The Company has put a lot of effort into writing this custom Start Page so that you can quickly access information relevant to your job, the projects you are working on etc.
                  </TextBlock>
               </Grid>
            </TabItem>
         </TabControl>
      </Grid>
   </Grid>
</Grid>

When you save these changes and reopen the Start Page you should see your new tab appear.

In chapter 3 of Professional Visual Studio 2010 it also covers extending the start page by creating a WPF control and adding that to your start page – this is a good was to invoke behaviour when the user interacts with your page. This process works as described, except you need to deploy the dll that contains the controls to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies directory so that they can be referenced by the start page.

Start Page Template

For VSX developers, this is important news because there are some major updates to improve the extensibility features especially around Visual Studio Shell development. This new version works on .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

Quan To has outlined these updates on VSX team blog but major updates are a reduction in the size of VS Shell package installers that no longer hold .NET Framework 3.5 data and also there is an update that lets you develop VS Shell applications as a normal Windows user that wasn’t possible before.

You can download Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 from here.

Following to my Visual Studio Shell series, in this post I want to introduce you to Visual Studio Shell isolated mode. Probably you’ve read my previous posts in this series that introduce Visual Studio Shell and Visual Studio Shell integrated mode.

Visual Studio Shell isolated mode is a completely new technology in Visual Studio 2008. Isolated mode is a great way to build your own IDE based on Visual Studio IDE elements. While you could use integrated mode to integrate your own extensions with Visual Studio IDE, isolated mode lets you to build your own IDEs similar to Visual Studio.

You know that Visual Studio has a great implementation of many common and professional user interface elements for building IDEs especially for programming and software related goals.

Suppose that you want to build a an IDE to work with your own programming language, say Keyvan++. You have several options but most of them lead to build most of the IDE with your own code but thank to new isolated mode you can do this easily just by applying Visual Studio user interface elements for your own IDE and write least code.

You can build isolated mode applications with Visual C++ language and isolated packages are available in Visual Studio project templates after installing Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

The important point about isolated IDEs is the fact that you don’t need to install Visual Studio as a prerequisite to run them. You just need to install a free isolated IDE package and .NET Framework 3.5 to be able to run such IDEs. Moreover, these prerequisites can be embedded in your setup installers to save end users from manual installation.

In prior versions of Visual Studio there was a Premier Partner Edition program for Visual Studio that let you to build such isolated IDEs in a more difficult way by installing some core APIs of Visual Studio. SQL Server 2005 Management Studio is a good and well-known example of this program. But Premier Partner Edition was tied to the installation of Visual Studio so Microsoft decided to provide a better way to accomplish this goal in Visual Studio 2008.

You probably know that different versions of Visual Studio have their own stub that is like a unique application ID for them. So Standard edition has its own stub while Team Suite has a different stub and these two editions can run independently on same machine. Isolated mode runs IDEs with their own stub which makes them independent from Visual Studio editions and they can run easily.

I’ll talk more about the isolated mode in the future but for now I can refer you to some open source projects that have built isolated IDEs for different purposes:

• IronPython Studio is an isolated IDE built by Clarius Consulting on top of the isolated mode of Visual Studio Shell and IronPython example included in Visual Studio SDK.
• Storyboard Designer is another open source IDE built on top of Visual Studio Shell isolated and DSL tools that lets you design storyboard diagrams.
• AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is the last example that I list here and is an IDE to build add-ins for World of Warcraft game.

Keep an eye on this post series. I’ll step in more technical details about Visual Studio Shell isolated mode in future posts.

And it would be a busy year for Visual Studio community as well, especially for VSX community as Ken Levy has pointed in his interview with .NET Rocks in a podcast.

If you don’t know Ken, I have to introduce him first. Ken is the Program Manager of Visual Studio Ecosystem team (the team that is responsible for extensibility features and DSL tools). Ken also gave me some help by giving a few comments on my book and I have to thank him here.

In show #303 you can listen to Ken’s interview with .NET Rocks about Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) which is now going to become a very important topic in near future and as Ken said in the podcast it’s going to have a separate community for its own.

In this episode Ken talks about Visual Studio Extensibility but his main focus is on Visual Studio 2008 Shell and its applications and samples. He also shares Microsoft’s plans for the future of VSX and its community and brings us good news about it.

If you’re interested in VSX topic then I’d recommend you to listen to this podcast and get some nice information.

Visual Studio Shell integrated mode is a new name for what we knew as VSPackages for a long time. This new name hasn’t made that name obsolete but is just here to show that both integrated and isolated mode are built on top of the same foundation.

As I said in before, new version of Visual Studio Team Explorer has implemented as a VS Shell integrated application and when you’re installing Team Explorer, can notice this because installer lists shell integrated package as one of prerequisites that will be installed.

Even though integrated mode is just the other name of VSPackages but Microsoft has tried to put some new similarities between integrated mode and isolated mode so has added some new features to VSPackages for this goal.

For example, deployment of VSPackages has been made pretty easier with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and its SDK and Visual Studio generates a package definition file for you. This package definition file is actually a registry file that you had to build yourself for VSPackages prior to Visual Studio 2008.

VS Shell integrated is the top enhanced way to integrate something with Visual Studio because provides a set of low level APIs to work with IDE and this is much more than what you have when writing add-ins or macros.

In this series, my primary focus is on isolated mode because it’s a completely new thing and finding information about integrated mode wouldn’t be hard. But however, I will talk about integrated mode after finishing my posts about isolated as well.

This project is licensed under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and includes some key features:

• Visual Design Surface
• Lua Code Editor
• FrameXML IntelliSense
• Auto-Generate Table of Contents
• Auto-Generate Lua Events

This would be a good recommendation for everyone who wants to dive deeper into VS Shell isolated mode and you can check out its design and source code to learn many things.

Visual Studio is nothing but a new extensibility point for Visual Studio to let you create integrated extensions for Visual Studio or use its common elements to build your own IDE for different purposes.

I can explain this by pointing that Visual Studio Shell consists of two main modes: integrated and isolated.

The integrated mode is very similar to the nature of VSPackages and actually has similar development process as them. Integrated mode lets you create integrated elements for Visual Studio IDE using its underlying APIs. An instance of this is Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer which is actually implemented as a VS Shell integrated mode application.

The isolated mode is the new thing. It lets you use Visual Studio IDE elements to build a new IDE for your own. For example, you can use Visual Studio IDE elements to build a UML diagramming tool with same look and feel. You may be surprised and ask that this was possible before thing and yes, you’re absolutely right! But the point is you could install Visual Studio IDE (well, actually the core APIs needed to do this) on a machine then use some complicated development techniques to use its elements to build your own IDE like SQL Server Management Studio. But in Visual Studio Shell isolated mode you no longer need to install those core APIs because Microsoft has provided an stand-alone package that you can add to your setup projects and use it to run your own IDEs.

Moreover, Visual Studio Shell isolated mode has simplified the development process for such an IDE and made it much simpler than the past and has organized Visual Studio elements to different groups to let you use them easily in your own IDEs.

In fact what is now amazing developers about Visual Studio Shell is this isolated mode which is completely new because you already know how to work integrated mode via VSPackages. I want to write more about about isolated mode on this blog in the future.

The next post would be about technical differences between integrated mode and isolated mode.

Clarius Consulting company which is one of most active Visual Studio extension creators, just released the November CTP of its Visual Studio Shell sample application named Storyboard Designer on CodePlex with source code.

Storyboard Designer is a Visual Studio Shell Isolated application that applied some other extensibility options such as DSL tools and project templates to create a real world Visual Studio sample application in an excellent way.

This application uses the isolated mode of Visual Studio Shell along storyboard designer of DSL tools and custom project templates to achieve its goals so can be used a very good example for Visual Studio Extensibility options.

This application is written for final versions of Visual Studio 2008 and its SDK so you need to have these three tools installed to be able to run it:

• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0
• Visual Studio 2008 Shell Isolated Model redistributable package

I’d recommend anyone who is interested in VSX professionally to take a look at this sample application.

I’m going to write a set of posts about VS Shell on this blog in the near future.