Chapter 2. The Visual Studio IDE and MEF

This release of Visual Studio sees the IDE overhauled and much of it rewritten using WPF and managed code. The move to WPF allows Microsoft to make some stunning aesthetic additions to the IDE, and also opens up customization possibilities when combined with the new Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

Microsoft's use of WPF for a flagship product such as Visual Studio is important, as this demonstrates its commitment to the framework and confidence in its maturity.

In this chapter I will begin by looking at some of the new productivity enhancements in VS2010. I will then create a code snippet and customize the start page. Finally I will introduce MEF and take a look at some of the advanced customizations that it enables.

64-BIT VERSION OF VISUAL STUDIO?

A common question is whether Microsoft will release a 64-bit version of Visual Studio. At the time of writing, Microsoft has said it has no plans to do, for the following reasons:

  • Making use of lazy loading techniques would be a more cost-efficient way to improve the IDE's performance, and would benefit 32-bit users as well.

  • A 64-bit version could adversely affect performance because data structures will use more memory.

  • There are cost issues. Rico Mariani (see the following link) suggests that the cheapest way to provide 64-bit support would be to incrementally convert the IDE to managed code, but this would break many existing extensions.

For a detailed discussion of this issue, please refer to the following link: http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx.


..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
13.58.199.182