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.

Doug is a Principal Architect on Visual Studio platform and this interview is a very nice overview of VSX history during the past years. Visual Studio is one of the very old products of Microsoft and has evolved in these years.

This is yet another video about VSX on Channel 9 and it’s interesting to see the growing number of such videos. The text transcript of this interview is also published on CoDe Focus magazine.

When Visual Studio was created originally, the common development technologies were all based on COM programming so Visual Studio was created based on a COM infrastructure.

Those days this wasn’t anything uncommon or special and all developer around the globe were using it. After the birth of .NET technology and its new infrastructure that is completely different from COM, Microsoft didn’t rewrite its IDE to be compatible with new stuff and just applied and updated the existing IDE for .NET development.

Here (the birth of .NET) was a point that changed many things around this IDE. Regular development scenarios and many developers don’t notice the side-effect of keeping the COM nature of Visual Studio but the fact is that this COM nature is now showing its bad effect on this IDE from the extensibility point of view.

Visual Studio is strongly correlated with its COM infrastructure and almost everything is an implementation of an interface. Microsoft has tried to adapt the existing IDE for newer technologies and hide the core API to some extent.

On the other hand, Visual Studio IDE for .NET development (versions 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2008) are great examples of interoperability between .NET and COM in its highest level.

By the way, this wouldn’t be important for anyone but two groups of developers. First groups are those who work at Microsoft to add new features for development to it and the second group are VSX developers. Both groups of developers should deal with extensibility features of VS and lower levels of its API.

If you begin working with Visual Studio Extensibility then you will notice the side-effect of this COM nature after a short while. Here those who don’t have a good background in COM programming, have some difficulties to learn VSX and this is a negative point for VS because new age of developers wouldn’t know much about COM.

One of the good strategies that Microsoft is considering for VS is hiding the lower level APIs from developers who want to extend Visual Studio just by building a .NET infrastructure on top of these APIs. For instance, when you work with code snippets or Visual Studio templates, you don’t deal with anything related to these low level APIs at all.

But unfortunately this is just for some stuff that aren’t strongly correlated with low level API. So all professional VSX developers have to work with COM-related stuff and this is one of the main negative points that a newbie faces with!

This blog, which is hosted on MSDN blogs, acts as the FAQ of the Visual Studio Extensibility for developers.

As Ken has written in the announcement, this blog (or FAQ) is very useful for scenario-based references where people are looking for answers to common scenarios.

This is another good step forward to the Microsoft’s big plans for VSX in 2008. Such a rich FAQ can help developers a lot.

As I wrote on my main blog, my book, Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, officially released today and you can order it on Wiley or Wrox sites. There are already sample PDF files and code downloads for the book available on these sites.

It should be also available on Amazon and Barnes and Novel shortly and those who have pre-ordered it should receive it in next couple of weeks.

I’ve written more details about the book on my blog that you can read there. It’s a pleasure to finally see the book getting out to markets and finding its way to bookshelves. Readers of this blog who had left comments to receive free copies of my book and got my confirmation should receive their copies in a few days because they will be sent today or tomorrow.

I’m looking forward for feedbacks from readers. Some reviews will be published on .NET communities and blogs in next couple of months that can help others to decide whether they want to order my book.

I have to thank Nick and Dave for helping me on book promotion on this blog. We will be able to get our hands on Professional Visual Studio 2008 in a few months which is a great complementary for my book.

You need to have Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 installed to be able to open the source code for these commands.

A short list of features that are provided by this project are:

• Collapse Projects
• Copy Class
• Paste Class
• Copy References
• Paste References
• Copy As Project Reference
• Edit Project File
• Open Containing Folder
• Open Command Prompt
• Unload Projects
• Reload Projects
• Remove and Sort Usings
• Extract Constant
• Clear Recent File List
• Clear Recent Project List
• Transform Templates
• Close All

You can download the package that contains the source code of PowerCommands from the announcement post.

Visual Studio Gallery is a site which lists add-ins and extensions for Visual Studio whether they’re created by Microsoft or by third party vendors. There are also both free and commercial extensions listed.

On the site, you can find these add-ins and extensions by category. Each extension has its own description and a link to get access to more information and/or download it.

You know that Visual Studio SDK versions are released on a regular basis between Visual Studio releases so the next upcoming version of Visual Studio SDK in next a few months should fix most of these issues.

Visual Studio Ecosystem team is listening to your feedbacks, bug reports and feature requests to regard them in each new version of Visual Studio and its SDK so don’t hesitate to go ahead and write a few words for them on Visual Studio Extensibility forum.

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.

Moreover, Domain-Specific Languages tools are supported by Professional edition or above so you can develop a DSL with Professional edition or above but can deploy a DSL to all commercial editions including the Standard edition.

Generally Professional edition is enough for someone who wants to develop and use extensibility options but above editions can be better because of the features that they offer for debugging, testing and other general-programming tasks.