Carlos Quintero's blog

Microsoft has just published some early specifications (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948851.aspx) about the new Visual Studio “Orcas” and among them, it is the “CommandBar Improvements” (http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/9/c/59cd0dc5-4691-4c3e-840c-66d865f27692/command-bar-improvements.xps) which has an intriguing paragraph: “The work we will do here will cause us to diverge from Office’s MSO Commmand Bar look and feel. Office 2007 (formerly known as Office “12”), will still use […]

Microsoft has a FAQ: Visual Studio and Windows Vista (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948854.aspx) where it is stated that Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 will not be supported on Windows Vista, and that only VS 2005 will be supported with the SP1 and a (post-SP1) Vista Support Update. I have some comments about this: The first one is that although .NET Framework 1.x […]

My MZ-Tools 2005 add-in, like many others migrated from VS.NET 2002/2003 still uses COM registration, rather than XML registration (.AddIn file) and since it wants to be a good citizen in the new Windows Vista operating system, it uses HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to register within Visual Studio 2005 so the administrator installing it makes it available to […]

I have been visiting forums about Visual Studio extensibility since year 2002 or so, and it is almost a law that if you are a newbie starting in this world of add-ins, you will have to ask the same questions that others before you because you don’t know the basics or you find an unexpected behavior. So, I have […]

I’ve been always fascinated about drivers, plugins, etc. They allow you either to extend a system with new functionality or to use a system with pieces of hardware or software from different providers: Back in the early 90’s when I was in college I wrote a program to make crosswords that I sent to a company […]

When you think about developing add-ins likely you think that the only tools that you need are Visual Studio IDE and its debugger, right? Well, sometimes you will find that your add-in does not appear in the Add-In Manager at all, or it doesn’t load (apparently) or it causes some COM exception when it is […]

Finally I decided to start a blog about Visual Studio extensibility: macros, add-ins, templates, SDK packages, and so on. My name is Carlos Quintero, I am from Madrid (Spain) (so I do not speak English natively as you will notice) and I am Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2004. If you have come to […]