On Visual Studio Extensibility
Reflecting on my journey and experiences extending Visual Studio for over 15 years.
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Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.
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Developer PowerShell Core Prompt in Visual Studio Code Integrated Terminal
Visual Studio recently got a new Developer PowerShell command prompt, which is super useful since it has all the environment variables properly set up to do things like msbuild from command line and have it pick the “right” MSBuild. [Read More] -
Serverless redirection to save us from ugly URLs
I’m a fan of CI-independent serverless nuget feeds: you can push packages from arbitrary systems to a single feed that is highly available and requires no maintenance. It can also be made public access (which Azure Artifacts/VSTS still doesn’t allow). [Read More] -
How To Install and Cleanup Visual Studio 2017 Instances
Visual Studio 2017 allows multiple side by side installations, which makes experimenting with various versions and extensions a breeze. Here's how you quickly and easily install and optionally cleanup so-called 'instances' that may have become broken for whatever reason. [Read More] -
How To Migrate PCL and Xamarin.Forms Apps to NETStandard Today
One of the reasons devs don’t update their (Xamarin.Forms) PCL library projects to .NETStandard 2.0 is that there are a bunch of NuGet packages that still haven’t migrated to it. It turns out, that that’s not a problem at all! [Read More] -
Test and Switch: testable yet high performance cross-platform libraries
If you are writing Xamarin apps, there’s a high chance you are also leveraging the MVVM pattern: [Read More] -
Why do project dependencies become project references?
Sometimes you want certain projects to be built before others in a solution, even if there shouldn't be a project reference between them. This is how you can avoid such a build dependency to become a project reference automatically. [Read More] -
How to get Visual Studio 2017 installation path
From MSBuild it’s easy, just use $(VsInstallRoot), but what about your VS extension? It’s also quite easy, although far less discoverable. [Read More] -
How to include PackageReference DLLs in your VSIX extension
If you migrate your VSIX package references from packages.config to PackageReference, you will notice they all vanish from your output .vsix file. This is the easy way to bring them all back in a generic fashion. [Read More] -
How to include PDBs in your VSIX extension
In order to get better stack traces and logs from your Visual Studio extensions, it may be a good idea to include the PDBs inside the VSIX. The VSSDK doesn’t do this by default, but it’s trivial to do it in a generic fashion for all your extensions. [Read More]