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by Dan Fernandez.
Original Post: Visual Studio 2005 Community Integration FAQ
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In the Visual Studio Connections keynote, I demonstrated the new features for finding and sharing content using Visual Studio 2005. In the demo, I showed how a developer can open up C# Express (or just about any VS 2005 product), click File New Project...Online Template...search for community content and download them to their machine. I won't spend time going through everything I showed at VS Connections, I'll save that for another blog post, but I wanted to quickly discuss the community features showed in the demo in a FAQ format, based on the questions I've received so far.
Community Features Quick FAQ
Q: What community integration is included in Visual Studio 2005? A: You will be able to ask a question in the newsgroups, submit Product Feedback, check question status, connect to MSDN developer center's and our CodeWise community, and even search for content directly in the product. Below is a screenshot of the new top-level Community menu.
Q: What Visual Studio 2005 products will include these community integration features? A: All VS 2005 products from Express up to VSTS, with the exception of C++ for content search since they use a different project system.
Q: What exactly is the Community Content Search or online templates feature? A: I'll use the analogy of Microsoft Word. If you want to create a Fax cover sheet, resume, or letter in MS Word, all you need to do is click File New...and select from a list of document template. We are using the same analogy by making it so that developers can have fully built project templates. So if you wanted to create a Personal Web site it is as easy as clicking File..New...Personal Web site. An instance of a template for a Personal Web site would then be created. You can change, customize and extend the instance without breaking the template itself. We've extended this feature and made it so that not only will you have templates inside the product, but you'll be able to search online for new templates built by the community inside of Visual Studio.
Q: What problem does the community content solve? A: First, it makes it easy to discover and share content directly in Visual Studio. Another feature, Export Template, that I'll discuss below makes it dramatically easier to package your content for sharing. You no longer have to go through an installer or muck around with setting up an app.config file or other settings, your content will "just work". No more missing files or installers for samples, you now have a nice pre-packaged sample.
Q: So does this mean that you will ship with new project templates beyond Windows Forms, Web Forms, class libraries, etc? A: Yes, we are still working on finalizing the list of project and item templates that will be in Visual Studio 2005. The important part is that we are also adding a way to search for new templates online directly in the product.
Q: Marie's blog post mentions a new file extension, *.vsi, what is that file extension? A: The Visual Studio Installer (vsi) file extension is a new file extension for Visual Studio 2005. It is basically a zip file that contains community content and includes XML that describes the community content, which is in another new file extension, *.vscontent. Visual Studio 2005 knows how to handle VSI files. You can find a screenshot of the innards of a *.vsi file here. Below is the contents of a *.vscontent file.
Q: What kind of content can be made available through the community search? A: Starter Kits, Code Snippets, Controls, Add-ins, and more. The nice part is that you can group content and include a Starter Kit and three code snippets all within one *.vsi template file.
Q: How does the content search work? A: Simply put, When you click File..New Project and search online templates, Visual Studio calls Web services hosted by MSDN that aggregate metadata about content. The Web services from MSDN aggregate metadata from content providers like MSDN and participating CodeWise communities. You'll see a search menu with the list of providers on the right hand side of the search box (see below).
Q: I downloaded the templates, where are they on my machine? A: It depends, you can tell Visual Studio where you want to save this file, in the Tools...Options...Settings as shown below:
By default, Visual Studio 2005 uses a new directory structure (see below) that contains directories for different kinds of content including - Code Snippets, Item Templates, Projects (which replaces the "Visual Studio Projects" directory), Project Templates, and your Visual Studio settings.
Q: Cool, how do I go about packaging my own content? A: Craig Skibo, rock star, has implemented the Export Template feature that makes creating a project template as easy as walking through a Wizard.
Q: Now that I've packaged my content, how do I share it for the whole world to see? A: Go to your favorite participating CodeWise partner and upload your content.
Q: This feature is great, but I work in an enterprise and don't want to share [insert company name here]'s project templates with the rest of the world, can I use this feature in my intranet? A: Absolutely, your organization will need to setup a set of Web services that let you search the content's metadata. You can then tell Visual Studio to search your custom Web services. The experience in Visual Studio will be the same and you'll be able to see your company's content available through the search capabilities.
Q: When will this feature be available for me to play with? A: This feature will be in the next Community Tech Preview and in Beta 2.
Q: When is Beta 2? A: This is an excellent time for me to pass the buck and point you to the new Developer Division Channel9 Page. Here you'll find lot's of good information on how we make software, and the latest updates on how Visual Studio 2005 is coming along.
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