Visual Studio Extensibility Conference Sessions Online

The VSX Developer Conference sessions covering a wide range of Visual Studio extensibility topics available online at channel 9.

VS Extensibility Architecture: Intro & Advanced Topics
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.

Building Custom Tools with Visual Studio 2008 Shell
James Lau, Senior Program Manager Lead, 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. 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!

From Hobby To Profit – How to Market Your Extensions
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.

The VSXtra Community Project: Driving Toward a New Visual Studio Managed Package Framework
Istvan Novak, VSX Insider, Grepton Informatics

In this session, you’ll be introduced to the current state and results of an experimental community project codenamed “VSXtra” (http://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.

Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools
Jean-Marc Prieur, Program Manager, 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.

Apples and Oranges or Fruit Salad? A Look at Open Source Versus Commercial Platform Strategies
Tim Wagner, Principal 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.

How I Extend Visual Studio 
Members of the VSIP Program and VSX Community

Members of the Visual Studio community will share 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.

How to Extend Visual Studio and Become a More Productive Developer
Pablo Galiano, VSX Insider, Clarius Consulting

Discover the most common extensibility points that Visual Studio offers and learn how to use them to improve your every day development. You will learn how to add commands, tool windows, transverse the solution explorer and code model hierarchies, listen to Visual Studio events, Visual Studio selection mechanism and more. We will develop a number of sample scenarios during the demo that will improve your productivity.

Visual Studio Add-ins, Templates and Wizards
Gabor Ratky, VSX Insider, EPAM Systems

A look at how to extend Visual Studio with Add-ins, Templates and Wizards

VSX: Extend Your Development Experience
Jean-Marc Prieur, Program Manager, Microsoft, and James K. Lau, Senior Program Manager Lead, Microsoft

Visual Studio provides a great set of development tools out of the box, but you may be surprised at how much more you can do with its rich extensibility platform. In this introductory session, we will give you a whirlwind tour of what the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) platform has to offer and how you can take advantage of it. Whether you are looking to increase you development team’s productivity, or you are looking for new business opportunities on the Visual Studio platform, this technical session will help you get started.

Deploying VSX Projects
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.

Advanced Code Generation Patterns with T4 & DSL Tools
Gareth Jones, Senior Software Developer, Microsoft, Jean-Marc Prieur, Program Manager, Microsoft, and Oleg Sych, Senior Lead Consultant, Catapult Systems

Code generation is an increasingly common technique in application development and forms a part of many Visual Studio extensions. With the addition of T4 to Visual Studio 2008, every developer has a powerful code generation engine available to them. In this session we'll look at patterns of usage of T4 and ways to structure your templates for large-scale reuse. We'll explore a sample that aids large scale code generation from DSL models and finally look at a community library which adds facilities to make the tricky problems of incremental code generation and reverse engineering from a DSL easier.

Extending ASP.NET MVC with Custom HTML Helpers 
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.

Beyond VS Packages - Adding Value with Blueprints 
Jack Greenfield, Senior Director, Microsoft

Are you building VS packages or Visual Studio components? Would you like to create holistic experiences, where developers can rapidly build specific types of components, applications or systems? Come and hear how you can take your business to the next level by building sets of integrated Visual Studio extensions called Blueprints that define and automate domain specific development processes.

VSX: The Debugging Automation Model
Laura Petersen

Learn the basics of the debugger automation model and how you can start extending it.

Extending Visual Studio 2008 Team Test
Bruce Taimana

Extending Visual Studio 2008 Team Test.

Client and Server Extensibility in Team Foundation
Bill Essary

In this session we will take a close look at Team Foundation Server (TFS) extensibility points. Extensibility on the client side can significantly influence the user experience, but it can be hard to manage. Server side extensibility can help add new tools to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), to create new integration solutions on top of TFS or to build bridges to existing systems. We will survey extensibility points available in TFS today and will work through the development of a sample that uses the most common client and server side extensibility points in this session. You will leave the session with a solid understanding of the opportunities available to customize and extend TFS.

Adding Value to Team Foundation Server
Pieter de Bruin

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the server component of Microsoft's Application Lifecycle Management solution. We all know TFS for its version control and work items functionality. TFS is also a great platform to extend for a specific organization or to sell including your own ALM additions. In this session we will focus on creating add-ons for TFS. We will start by briefly talking about customizing and extending TFS and then diving into specific extensibility scenarios for core TFS components and managing TFS installations.

The Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Database Project Ecosystem: Integrating ALM and Database Tools via Extensibility
Graham Barry, Senior Program Manager Lead, Microsoft and Mairead O'Donovan, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

Discover how Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario": Database Edition empowers developers to actively participate in, and bring agility to, the database development process. If you work with databases, you will want see how the features offered by the latest addition to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) integrate the database developer into the Application Development Lifecycle. This exciting product is changing the way database developers work with databases forever, by moving the "One Version of the Truth" for database schema from the production server into source control. This presentation focuses on extending the "Rosario" release of Database Edition to enable non SQL Server databases to plug into the VSTS Database Edition platform. Now database developers can manage their database schema changes for Microsoft SQL Server databases as well as non SQL Server databases within the same environment. In addition to enabling an extension platform for non SQL Server databases, learn also how the Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario": Database Edition has enabled a database development tools extensibility platform for third-party companies to plug in additional database development tools into the VSTS Database Edition product.