I had the pleasure of presenting to the Pittsburgh community today at Code Camp 2010.1. My talk was on extending Visual Studio for the community, packaging your extension (using VSIX), deploying that extension to the Visual Studio Code Gallery, and discovering that community content from within Visual Studio.

The talk went well—very interactive. Thanks to all those that participated! We did all of the following:

1. Installed the Visual Studio 2010 SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio, bottom left)
2. Wrote code: we wrote an MEF extension to the code editor for counting lines of code (including comments and whitespace). See below for a link to this sample code.
3. Packaged the code: created a VSIX project to include the extension. See below for a link to this project too.
4. Deployed to the Code Gallery: Created a page and deployed the VSIX project to the Visual Studio 2010 Code Gallery to make it discoverable to Visual Studio. See below for a link.
5. Discovered the extension: used the Visual Studio Extension Manager (Tools | Extension Manager) to find and install the extension from the code gallery. See Image below:

Key Downloads / Links for this Example:

• The Visual Studio SDK: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio, bottom left
• The Slides from the Talk: Code Camp - Community Development.pdf (271.41 kb)
• The MEF Extension Code: CodeCountAdornment.zip (88.63 kb)
• The VSIX Project Code: VsixCodeMetricInstaller.zip (76.76 kb)

I am excited to announce that we are again bringing developers together for Code Camp Pittsburgh! This is a free event, driven by the community. We typically get about 200 developers together to discuss all things .NET development. This year's event is Saturday April 4th. Lunch will be provided.

This year's speakers will be presenting a wide-range of great topics. Our speakers are local members of the development community that are interested in sharing their know-how on .NET development. I plan to speak on Microsoft SmallBasic. This technology is great for new-comers to development and those looking to pick up programming as a life-skill.

You can find out more (and register) at: http://codecamppgh.com/default.aspx