The Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) is arguably one of the most powerful and complex development tools in the world. In 2002, Craig Skibo,Marc Young, and I decided that a book was needed to show how developers could really extend this IDE and make it their own. That book was called Inside Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. This book, Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, is an update to that book.

Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 won't teach you programming. It will however, help you to understand the IDE and the project system, and it will tell you a lot about how you can adopt the IDE to meet your specific needs.

It might not take a village to write a book, but it takes a good sized team to put it together,so first of all we want to thank our editor, Devon Musgrave, for all the hard work that he put into this book. It's amazing how much work he can get out people purely though force of will. In addition, we thank Joel Rosenthal, who copy edited, and our good friend Bill Teel,who worked on the graphics. Thanks also to Ben Ryan and Elden Nelson for acquiring the book and to Carl Diltz and Elizabeth Hansford for production support. We also give a huge thanks to our internal reviewers: Prasadi de Silva, Mark Kenworthy, Nishan Jebanasam,Jeremy Jones, Sean Laberee, Tarek Madkour, Chad Royal, and Phil Taylor. Finally, thanks to Prashant Sridharan, Marie Hagman, Doug Hodges, the Visual Studio Extensibility Team, the Visual Studio Content Installer Team, and the Visual Studio Project team.

1 Introducing Visual Studio 2005

2 Project Management in Visual Studio 2005

3 The Visual Studio Editor

4 Community Content and VSTemplates

5 Using Visual Studio Macros

6 Extending the IDE with Add-Ins

7 Exploring Commands Programmatically

8 Managing Solutions and Projects Programmatically

9 Programming the Visual Studio User Interface

10 Text-Editing Objects and Events