September, 2010

Recently, for testing, I wanted to manipulate Visual Studio using DTE. DTE is Visual Studio’s Automation API but it also tends to be used in writing VS extensions and so on. I hadn’t done a lot of COM programming before, but I had done a little p/invoke interop code before and I sort of knew that .Net also has really useful interop features for dealing with COM interfaces. Also, I should mention that in the Visual Studio SDK which you can download, there are all the DTE COM interfaces are wrapped...

The 2010 release provided a dramatic shift in the build platform. Previous releases were built on top of MSBuild, providing integration through custom tasks and a special logger for tracking events during a build. Current and future releases are built on Windows Workflow Foundation, providing a design experience in Visual Studio and the ability to orchestrate a build process across multiple machines. During the product development cycle I learned quite a bit about workflow (having access to the architect...