I went to create my first new website with Visual Studio 2010 the other day and was quite surprised with what I found.

In all versions prior to 2010 a new website would just get you a Default.aspx and the corresponding language codebehind file. This changes quite a bit with 2010. You actually will now be presented with a full website ready to go. Complete with a Master page, account login and more.

Digging in Further yields some nice little nuggets. First off the Site.Master isn’t just a blank master page with a ContentPlaceHolder. It actually contains a relatively decent CSS layout with LoginView and Menu controls.

Along with the Site.Master the site comes with Default.aspx, About.aspx and an entire directory dedicated to authentication. The Account directory is set up to handle all the most common authentication scenarios: Login, Register and Password Recovery. Furthermore these pages include actual code in the codebehind.

One thing however that it is missing is the database to authenticate with. If you are planning to use your own membership provider or an external database you just need to set it up in the web.config. If you’d like to just use an sqlexpress database you can use the ASP.NET Website Administration Tool to do this for you. This tool was added in .NET 2.0 and the current version doesn’t seem to have changed much. To generate the ASPNETDB.MDF SQLExpress database. Just click on the Tool and World icon in the Solution Explorer.

Another way to access this tool is via the ASP.NET Configuration command under the Website menu.

The best way to have it set up the database is to click on the “Use the security Setup Wizard..” link. This will take you through setting up the database, roles, users and locked down directories.

Beyond the account code the site comes with jQuery 1.3.2, it’s minified version and the Visual Studio Intellisense file. Unfortunately the jQuery files are not referenced by default in the master page or any of the other pages. I would have loved to have either an example usage or at least a reference to the file. To add jQuery it’s just a simple addition to the master file. After that just force VS to update its javascript intellisense using Ctrl+Shift+j

Rarely do I start out a website this way these days, most my sites I start are powered by one CMS or another. Besides those times I’ve been trying to use ASP.NET MVC more these days. I still use the default webforms site when I need to get something up and running quick with some basic data controls. I recently did a website for planning a family reunion. I could have saved myself a half an hour or so getting just the base of the site set up.

For a few months now I’ve been working on a VS2010 extension I’m calling Funky Search. It’s basic intent is to bring tag based search and replace functionality to Visual Studio. My first order of business when creating this extension was the need for an HTML Parsing Engine. I had used HTML Agility Pack (HAP from now on) in the past. One downside of it is that it uses XPATH for querying the HTML. While in it’s day XPATH was a decent solution for searching XML structures, there are better searching solutions available today namely LINQ.

I set out and updated HAP to have all of it’s Node and Attribute collections to inherit from IList<T> instead of implementing their own Enumerators. I then added many helper methods to mimic LINQ to XML. With this I could now work on creating dynamic LINQ statements to power my extension.

While working on this I got into the community of people using HAP and I came across a larger issue, it had not been updated in years and the creator and other developer on the project had seemed to abandon it. I sent many emails to the creator Simon Mourier (former MS employee, and current CTO of SoftFluent) over the summer with no reply. I finally found his work email and discovered he was on vacation until early September. I was finally able to get in contact with him today and he added me as a developer on the project.

This will mark the first time in about 5 years I’m a developer on an open source project. Before coming to Sierra Bravo I was huge into open source, also at that time MS had no free versions of Visual Studio. I was working as a PHP developer and had contributed to some small projects and even worked on part of the Mozilla project adding in an easier way to code-sign your Mozilla/Firefox extensions.

I’m looking forward to advancing HAP, fixing bugs and making it easier to use. It sits in a unique position as being the only freely available HTML parser that works. While it can be used for dubious purposes as a page scraper it can also be used for good. I’ve used it in the past where we had a client that had their hosting provider go out of business, their site was going to only be up for another day and we had no direct access to their database server. We had FTP access to get the code of the site and access to a readonly front end that displayed the contents of the tables in html with no export functionality. I wrote a scraper with HAP to get those tables and put them into an importable format. With it I was able to download and import their database and save their site.

I searched far and wide and was unable to find a good quick tutorial on getting  a Visual Studio 2010 extension up and running. There are a few things wrong in the verbiage used that can be quite confusing.

Obtaining the VS 2010 Beta 1 SDK

The first order of business is to get the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 SDK, which will add the new templates for creating an extension.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d197feb6-ced5-40d4-949d-a51f02309ee8&displaylang=en

After downloading it and trying to install it you may run across an uncaught exception (like I did)

The error lies in the Bootstrapper (setup.exe). Since the VsSDK_sfx.exe is a self-extracting zip archive you can use your favorite unzipping utility to get the contents. (or you can take the hard way and get the files in your temp folder after it’s been unzipped). I prefer to use WinRar, it makes it extremely easy

After this there are only 5 files extracting.

We only care about 2 of them. vssdk.cab and vssdk.msi.
Launch the vssdk.msi . This is the main installer for the SDK. It gives little feedback and will auto close when it’s done installing.

Creating Your First VS2010 Extension Project

Launch Visual Studio 2010. In your New Projects dialog under <Your Language>/Extensibility you should now have “VSIX Project”

This project defines the basic extension for visual studio. Out of this you will be able to build your VSIX file for installation into Visual Studio.

After giving your new project a name you are given a barebones extension.

The Visual Studio Extension Manifest

First we’ll start off with an unfamiliar file, the extension.vsixmanifest file. This defines your extension, from title, to license agreement to pictures. While this file is a fairly simple XML file. The VS Team provided a nice interface for editing it.
 

While most of the form is pretty self explanatory, there are some specific points to make

• ID: This is your global ID for your extension. After you first publish your extension, it is probably a good idea to not change this.
• Version: this can be viewed as your installer version. It may not necessarily mirror your dll versions.
• Supported VS Editions: This is a big one and is also forward thinking. Here you can select from all the different versions of VS2010, including Express, Integrated and Isolated Shell. It can also be expanded later to include the next version of VS.

For more information on the vsixmanifest file, see the documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd393700(VS.100).aspx

The last two pieces are where things get interesting. There hasn’t been much said about how extensible Extensions are in VS2010.

Under References you can create references to other VS2010 extensions that your extension may depend on. Clicking on the Add Reference button gives you this dialog.

You’re given the options to select an extension you already have installed, add an external VSIX package or manually define one and a URL to download it from. The URL part is the real beauty. When installing your Extension it has the ability to get the latest and greatest of an extension. You can of course limit it as well to certain version numbers to avoid breaking changes. This creates a lean, mean on demand Extension.

The Content editor doesn’t seem to be fully baked. Here you can add extra content into your vsix package and have it registered upon install.  One example is a registering a Project Template. I’ve borrowed an example from the Card Game Starter Kit .

The Code

You will find one lone code file in your new project. Here is the CS version

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Threading;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensibilityHosting;

/// <summary>
/// Empty VSIX Project.
/// </summary>
namespace MyFirstVs2010Extension
{

}

Not much in there. This is where your imagination comes in

Here is where I’ll leave you to fend on your own for now. Navigating the Visual Studio SDK assemblies is another post all in itself.  You’ll find all assemblies you need under the Microsoft.VisualStudio namespace in your add references dialog. It is also possible to tie into Team System via the Microsoft.TeamSystem .

For some full source examples of VS 2010 Extensions, check out the Editor Samples on codeplex
http://editorsamples.codeplex.com/