Tag Admin extension is now available for Visual Studio 2013

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jan 1, 2015

Early last week, we released Tag Admin extension for Visual Studio 2015 to Visual Studio Gallery. The extension was well received by the community and we were helped with good number of downloads due to mention by blog posts by many community leaders. I have listed few mentions below.

How to compile .NET 2015 Preview projects with TFS 2013 Build

Tarun Arora on Dec 28, 2014

Struggling to compile your .NET 2015 Preview (.NET 4.6) solutions using TFS 2013 build? That’s because TFS 2013 uses MSBuild 12.0 as the default version. Your Microsoft .NET 2015 Preview (.NET 4.6 / C# 6 beta) solutions with fail compilation if you use TFS 2013 Build agents. Let’s see how this can be fixed…

How to open Configuration Manager in Visual Studio extensions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 24, 2014

Imagine you are developing a Visual Studio extension which requires you to prompt users to modify their project build configurations. The ideal way to do that is to open default configuration manager window of Visual Studio and let users configure. In this post we will see how to open Configuration Manager window of Visual Studio via Visual Studio SDK.

Administer Visual Studio Tags using TagAdmin Visual Studio extension

Tarun Arora on Dec 22, 2014

Manage Work Item tags from right with in Visual Studio using the TagAdmin extension. Watch this 2 minute video to get a headstart…

Better way to load dependent assemblies in your Visual Studio extensions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 13, 2014

I had previously written on how to load custom assemblies in your extension using AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve. It required few lines of code to be written in your VS package class. Today I am going to show you an easier way of doing the same.

Using exceptionless to track exceptions in your VS Extension

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 6, 2014

In the current competitive world, everyone knows releasing the product to market is only half the battle. You are expected to continuously monitor application for its usage, memory consumption, errors, to quickly address any issues in your application. Quickly addressing issues your customers facing is essential to keep existing customers with your product. There are already many solutions available in the market, which provide complete application monitoring and analytics for your application. Some popular ones are, Microsoft Application Insights and Telerik Analytics. However, if you are looking for tracking only exceptions in your applications and not interested in other usage trends, so that you quickly track unhandled exceptions, you have a friend in exceptionless.com

Link To Work Item – Visual Studio extension to link changeset(s) to work item directly from VS history window

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Aug 11, 2014

By linking work items and other objects, you can track related work, dependencies, and changes made over time. As the following illustration shows, specific link types are used to track specific work items and actions. (– via MSDN)

Using progress dialog in Visual Studio extensions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on May 23, 2014

As a Visual Studio extension developer you are required to keep the aesthetics of Visual Studio in tact when you integrate your extension with Visual Studio. Your extension looks odd when you try to use windows controls and dialogs in your extensions. Visual Studio SDK exposes many interfaces so that your extension looks as integrated with Visual Studio as possible.

Always open XAML files in full XAML view

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Apr 20, 2014

Lately in my current project, I have been doing lot of UI work and hence I constantly juggle between view model classes and Views (XAML files). When I double click the XAML files in Solution Explorer, it opens designer as well as XAML view.

I am Microsoft ALM MVP for 2014

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Apr 3, 2014

This has been my dream from couple of years now and it happened finally!

I received a mail 2 days back from Microsoft announcing that I have been awarded as MVP for my contributions to ALM and Developer Technologies. Below is the mail extract I received.