Paramesh Vaidyanathan and Rico Mariani: The Future of Visual Studio Extensibility (Channel 9)

Paramesh Vaidyanathan, Principal Product Unit Manager, and Rico Mariani, Architect for the Visual Studio Platform team shares their ideas and long term goals for Visual Studio.

You'll hear about the new changes coming to Visual Studio 2010 like the WPF-based editor, the new Visual Studio extensibility architecture and the key areas the team is looking to address beyond Visual Studio 2010.

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santosh_b Benjy

Nov 13, 2008 at 5:30 AM

Very interesting. Rico's illustration of the single threaded approach as analogous to the relay race is very good indeed. By the way, I just saw Tim Wagners PDC session on "Extending and Customizing VS" as well. It's good to see that the editor is going to be fully managed. I agree that not everything needs to move to managed code. Just the parts that devs have to interact with can be simplified.

I'd be interested to see if MPF becomes any simpler to use , or rather, if it takes less code to do things. Couple of things I have come across and have a question on whether VS10/11/x will address
(1) Istvan Novak's VSXTra library is a layer on top of MPF that I think is sorely needed. Will that be one of the things addressed in VS10 ( a simpler MPF) ?
(2) Have you seen Victor Garcia (of Clarius Consulting) post on "Simple things which are incredibly hard" where he points out a couple of areas where things that should be simple one or two lines of code end up being very long winded. I guess VSXTra will help now but again, are we taking this on board for VS10(+) ?
aL_ Kinect ftw

Nov 13, 2008 at 6:27 AM

cool stuff
i really hope the VS time are on the the backs of the wpf team to drive improvments into the platform
scott "the man" gu did wonderful things to the .net platform by betting on it with asp.net

dogfooding is a good thing and who of not a microsoft team can drive feedback into .net
short feedback loops are awsome
aL_ Kinect ftw

Nov 13, 2008 at 6:57 AM

it would be cool if you could add support for a new language in your VS installation by just dropping a dll or a folder with dlls in a some directory.. i guess that would be possible with MEF but i wonder hoe far of that is
florindonot

Nov 13, 2008 at 4:06 PM

you people have in-principle OK ideas but you lack the vitality to say NO and to cut to the relevant.
you end up with kilometers of code, which only reinforces what you are able to do today and ends up defining the status quo for everyone else. this is comfortable (and so it is understandable - there is no contempt) but there are cleaner ways forward.
ricomariani Perf Dude

Nov 25, 2008 at 1:32 PM

Wow.

I mean, seriously, wow.

I think that's the first time I've ever been accused of lacking the vitality to say no. This is a totally new experience for me.

And that comment is also lucid and gender neutral. Mind if I borrow it for my next exec meeting?

But to your point, there are few people who lament the "kilometers of code" more than I do. This isn't something you can fix overnight but there isn't any way I'm going to allow a lack of vitality on my part to slow the process down. I promise.

Just what I needed, more pressure
florindonot

Dec 02, 2008 at 6:11 PM

good luck to you.
Beryl Plimmer

Jan 21, 2009 at 12:38 PM

Hi guys

I know I'm a bit slow, I am really interested in what you are doing here from the perspective of being able to ink annotate over the ide - we have several failed attempts at getting this going how we would like it to. We were so frustrated with the extensiblity (or not) of ides we published a paper on it. It should be in ACM DL by now, but if not it is here http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~beryl/publications/CHINZ_2008_Issues_of_Extending_IDES.pdf

love to hear if you think it will be achievable with the new version.

cheers
Beryl