Hello World of VS
At Clarius we’ve spent years doing Visual Studio extensibility. Literally. We LOVE doing so. We did so much of it during the years that chances are pretty high you’ve been using some of our stuff (fully or partially developed by us) at one point or another. A non-exhaustive list includes:
- patterns & practices Guidance Automation (and many of the original p&p “software factories” since 2005)
- IronPython Studio
- StoryBoard Designer
- Demo Dashboard
- Visual T4
- Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack
- Feature Builder Power Tool
- Regex Editor
- Image Insertion
- Export Template Wizard
- Search References
- Design for Operations
- Countless DSLs, including heavy customization, the Designer Integration Powertoy, etc. ;)
In my opinion, Visual Studio 2010 marks a significant milestone in making the platform easily extensible. We can thank MEF for a lot of that.
So we wanted to do something to help foster the developer community by giving everyone a central place where suggestions for improvements to VS can be made. Having a single place where Visual Studio Extensibility enthusiasts can lookup ideas for a weekend’s pet project, or where big companies (including Microsoft!) can look for future product features and improvements, is definitely valuable.
But we wanted to go further. We also want to be an actual development arm that brings the best ideas to fruition. We will be actively picking up ideas and implementing them for your enjoyment. Search References is one example, with many more on the way.
I sincerely look forward to the World of VS to become your world too. We have a much bigger vision for it that we’ll be sharing over time, but I think this is already an exciting beginning!
And just to make it a tad more interesting and engaging at launch time, we’re giving away a FULL MSDN Universal subscription to the most voted idea! Go ahead and share with the world your biggest pain or your crazy idea for VS2010!
/kzu
/kzu
/kzu dev↻d