Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter VII.1. Exploring Visual Studio Extensions

The name of this chapter should be "Getting Everything You Can from Visual Studio 2008, Now and in the Future." Since the release of Visual Studio in October 2007, Microsoft has released a ton of free add-ons that you can download from the Web.

Extending Visual Studio

You have many opportunities to extend Visual Studio. Some are add-ons from Microsoft; others are cool toys created by the community. This section lists a few of both — and share some additional resources with you, including how to get hold of trial versions of development tools.

Adding administration and troubleshooting tools

One of the best things about add-ons is that all you have to do to get them is download them. Some help you administer and troubleshoot development projects; others provide new tools for programming Vista and Office 2007.

Administrative and troubleshooting downloads available from Microsoft include the following:

• Team Foundation Server (TFS) Admin Tool — As an administrator, add users to TFS through a single user interface (UI). Download the tool from

  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/tfs2008

• Web Application Projects — Create ASP.NET Web sites. Originally used for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0, these projects easily load into and are converted to Visual Studio 2008 for .NET 3.5. (As this book goes to press, there is no similar page for Visual Studio 2008.) Download from

  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/asp.net/aa336618.aspx

• Web Deployment Projects — Create a project ...