Customizing Visual Studio has never been easier and is often overlooked as a potential development time-saver! Visual Studio supports a number of quick ways to extend without any code and when task gets tougher the addition of Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and the new VSIX packaging model allows code based solutions to be easily developed! Come to this demo-heavy session to see how you can take advantage of the different forms of extensibility and use them to improve your Visual Studio experience.

1. Extend Visual Studio 2010 Presented by Robert MacLean  @rmaclean

2. Assumptions of this talk Level 200 Assume you have used VS Assume you are a developer

3. Agenda What extending means? Where it goes beyond configuration! Start at level 100 Snippets (little demo) & Templates (little demo) Move to level 200 MEF (little demo) Finish off in level 300ish Extensions (big demo) Add-ins (little demo)

4. Not covered today Diagram & Arch extensions Requires Ultimate UML - Just XML additions Arch tools - MEF

5. Problem Often typing the same code over and over again Complex patterns hard to remember

6. Demo Snippets: How to use and how they work Shortcut fail

7. Snippet Summary Simple reusable chunks of code Snippet manager for sharing Designer exists

8. Problem Often typing the same code over and over again Set up on new work is time consuming I wish everyone on my team did things correctly from the start Complex patterns hard to remember

9. Demo Project Templates

10. Template Summary Easy to build solutions to save some time Simple, too simple, deployment model Microsoft extension for making VSIX easily VERY extensible with the wizard interface

11. VSIX Summary What it can’t do: Write to registry Add to GAC Prompt user Party trick: Integrated Visual Studio Gallery Experience Other deployment options: Executable formats (msi/exe)

12. Problem Need a way to loosely couple together components at runtime

13. Demo Managed Extensibility Framework

14. MEF Summary Way to compose parts, like plugins or addins PARTS of Visual Studio support this

15. Problem Need to enhance the Visual Studio IDE Syntax highlighting for my new language Want to do some visual cues to improve productivity

16. Extension Class Structure Definition Tells Visual Studio that we creating a custom definition Provider Tells Visual Studio that this exists and what it is for (classifier) Formatter How would we like our code to be formatted Classifier Tells Visual Studio what text this applies to

17. Demo Visual Studio Extensions

18. Extensions Summary Awesome for rich experiences Easy to build – just need to navigate the complex documentation Limited scope THIS is the growth point for VS 11

19. Problem Need to enhance the Visual Studio IDE beyond extensions Need menu items and/or custom tool windows Need my own editor

20. Demo Visual Studio Add-Ins

21. Add-ins & Packages Summary FULL power experience Better documented (been around longer)

22. Summary No Code What you want likely already exists in the gallery! Snippets Templates Code Extensions powered by MEF Add-ins are full power

23. Thank YOU! Robert MacLean www.sadev.co.za (slides + demo scripts) @rmaclean