Solution Colors gives each Visual Studio solution a visual identity. Behind the color picker are useful lessons about shell customization, branch-aware settings, and keeping decorative UI from interfering with the IDE.

Lore for Visual Studio brings Epic Games' offline-first source control workflow into the IDE and demonstrates how a new source-control provider can integrate with Visual Studio.

Max Line Length turns EditorConfig’s max_line_length convention into a live Visual Studio ruler and a safe, opt-in reflow pipeline.

Bookmark Studio turns Visual Studio bookmarks into named, color-coded, shareable navigation points. Here is how it combines editor taggers, tracking points, a native tool window, command interception, and portable JSON storage.

Turning a code sample into an image sounds simple until the image needs to look like the code inside Visual Studio. Copying text into a design tool loses editor colors and formatting. Taking a normal screen capture...

Shows how to modify an existing extension to support Visual Studio 2019

I’m often asked how to best learn to build Visual Studio extensions, so here is what I wished someone told me before I got started. Don’t skip the introduction It’s easy to create a new extensibility project in Visual...

Having great samples to help you learn about any programming language or paradigm can be very valuable. In my opinion, a good sample can be characterized by: Being easy to replicate Having clear steps that guide the...

In an episode of .NET Rocks from December 2016 I declared that Web Essentials would not be carried forward to Visual Studio 2017 and beyond. I’ve decided that was a bad idea, released a version for Visual Studio 2017 and...

For the past couple of years, Web Essentials have been including features for bundling and minifying JS and CSS files as well as compiling LESS, Sass and CoffeeScript. As of Web Essentials 2015 that is no longer the...