Mads Kristensen

Great Visual Studio extensions share a few key features that sets them apart from the rest. They look and feel well crafted, are performant and reliable, do what they advertise to perfection, and blend in naturally among Visual Studio’s own features.

Whether you are new or have been using Visual Studio for years, there are a bunch of tips and tricks that can make you more productive. We’ve been sharing tips on Twitter using the #vstip hashtag for a while, and this is a collection of the best ones so far.

Most Visual Studio extension authors publish their extensions to the public Marketplace to allow everyone to install them and benefit from the large and open ecosystem. However, some companies create extensions for internal use only. A private gallery allows them to distribute these extensions with ease.

On Friday, May 10th we hosted both internal and external Visual Studio extension authors in the Workshop room in building 18 on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. It was a full day event with keynotes and sessions for 60 attendees – half of which attended //build earlier that same week, and half who came just for the Extensibility Day.

Today, we are making Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1 generally available, as well as the first preview release of Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2. You can download both versions from VisualStudio.com. If you already have Preview installed, you can alternatively click the notification bell from inside Visual Studio to update.

Visual Studio 2019 starts blocking synchronously autoloaded extensions in version 16.1. We’ve seen a tremendous effort of both 1st- and 3rd-party extensions to implement async background load. It’s been truly amazing to see the community of extension authors stepping up to the task.

Take advantage of new features for extension authors in Visual Studio 16.1 Preview 1. This includes support for referencing Shared Projects for a VSIX project, per-monitor awareness, a new SDK meta package, and more.

A few days ago, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2019. But I’ve been using Visual Studio 2019 exclusively since the first internal build – long before the release of Preview 1 in December of 2018. During this time, there has been a lot of little features that have put a smile on my face and made me more productive. I want to share a few of them with you.

Please join us for a day full of Visual Studio extensibility deep dives, geek-outs, and networking on Friday, May 10th, 2019 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Our agenda is intended for existing and new Visual Studio IDE (not VSCode) extension authors and partners and will be highly technical in nature.

Visual Studio ships with Newtonsoft.Json and extension authors can use it too. However, it can be confusing to understand what version to use, how binding redirects work and whether to ship Newtonsoft.Json in the extension itself. This post helps to clarify how it all works.