PDC05: Extending Visual Studio with Add-ins and Packages

The last “main” session I attended today was on extending the Visual Studio .NET IDE.  This session was of particular interest to me as I’ve dabbled with the VSIP for quite some time now and never been able to get anything truly of interest working.  I listened intently as they described the improvements in the VSIP (now the VS.NET SDK) in the latest versions.  Key things are that they now support fully-managed packages… meaning I shouldn’t have to look at C++ (yeah!).  The wizards for add-ins are a little bit better now, and the registration process is greatly improved.  They took us through two demos and answered a good number of questions.

After the session, I took some time and worked through one of the hands-on-labs avaialble on this very topic and was able to successfully get a dockable tool window sample working… maybe there is hope…

Of most interest is that after the sessions, many of the MSFT people are simply “around” for you to talk to… I was able to spend a fair amount of time discussing some questions around multiple-tool-window interactions with the very same guys that normally work on this stuff… it was a great opportunity and I’m appreciative of the time they spent with me.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.