There's a news report about what MSFT disclosed at the VS Live! event.  See the link for info about some of the cool things we're doing in Whidbey (the next major release of VS) and Orcas (the release after that).  Whidbey is what most of the VS teams are spending most of their time on...

There's now free registration at the VSIP site to become a VSIP ("Visual Studio Industy Partner"), which is the program whereby you can write a low-level package that integrates more deeply into Visual Studio than is possible as an add-in (or macro).  The VSIP program is great for 3rd party...

Greetings, all.  So...I was re-reading (well, actually re-skimming) Pete McBreen's book Software Craftsmanship, which I think has a lot of interesting observations. One of the things he calls for is a return to the practice of letting software teams insert their names into the...

A reader named Martin makes a good point made about my earlier weblog entry about Watson crashes; he says we could offer a way to let users provide more information when a bug is difficult to reproduce.  Actually, we already do this in cases where we're having difficulty making progress, I just...

My dear readers, I have a terrible admission to make.  But it's time to come clean with you.  The fact is, of our hundreds of thousands of users, a small number encounter crashing bugs in Visual Studio.  They are working happily along, and *boom* some terrible crash will occur.  Then,...

A reader named Uri commented on my July 15th entry about safe handling of untrusted solutions & projects.  He brings up some good points which I thought worth addressing. One thing he mentions is that often one needs to grab a whole sample project at a time and can't just grab snippests...

Greetings all!  It's a hot summer here in the Seattle area.  We went on a family getaway this last weekend and I got a chance to do some reading.  I finally got a chance to finish "Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing" by Jane Margolis & Allan Fisher.  This is a really good, and...

Greetings, my dear readers.  I wanted to offer some suggestions about how VS users can safely handle code obtained from other sources.  A combination of common sense and careful reading of the VS documentation would lead you to the same conclusions I’m laying out here, but I thought it...

A person named Blair commented on one of my prior entries about using linked files.  They mention that the integration of a project's linked files with source code control has some limitations, esp. when you link to files outside the current project directory. I looked into this issue a bit, and...

Now, this feature could be described as more of a text editor feature than a project feature, and it's not owned by my team, but it's relevant & useful enough that I think it's worth mentioning here. With VS you can save a text file with an arbitrary language encoding (ANSI, Shift-JIS,...

So, someone here at MS who was more blog-savvy than me pointed out that I wasn't using categories, which is a real annoyance for those listening via RSS. I plan my comments here two basically fall into two categories.  Entries in the "VS tips" category will be tips on using Visual Studio,...

There are generally two kinds of books.  Those that you read once and seldom return to, and those that you want to reread every few years.  (And if you're smart you'll get the ones in the first group from the library and only buy those in the second group!) A book that I reread...

Well, I'm back.  Had a great time in Minnesota, but alas, all good vacations must come to an end.  I have some reflections which I might share later, but right now I want to tell you about another highly useful feature which is so obscurely hidden that some of you may not realize it's there. ...

One little tip before I leave town.  A very useful but well-hidden feature is that of "linked files" within a VB or C# project.  This lets you point to a file without having it be copied into the same directory of your project.  You still get syntax coloring, intellisense, etc.  Here's...

Hi all -   Well, the MSBuild Team is growing, and I have a job opening (see here for the full job description).  I'm looking for someone with smarts, drive, a team-player mentality, an obsession with quality, and least two years of industry experience.  You need not have deep experience with build technologies (but...