Sandor Korozsi’s linkblog

Stepping Up Windows Mobile Development with Visual Studio 2005

Introduction
With each new release of the Windows Mobile operating system for Pocket PC and Smartphone devices, users benefit from ever-richer feature sets, improved usability and increased overall power.

As a result, application developers now have a fantastic opportunity to create innovative solutions for both the consumer and the enterprise user. To help do this efficiently, Visual Studio 2005 incorporates many features that make developing for Windows Mobile a breeze. Together with the Windows Mobile 5.0 Software Development Kits, it provides access to the latest, most flexible mobile platforms available today.

This article will attempt to highlight a few of the many great features that make this development suite the tool of choice when targeting Windows Mobile. It will take a look at Visual Studio 2005 features in the following major areas:

1. User Interface Design
2. Application Development and Testing
3. Solution Deployment

By the end of this article, you will have become familiar with the significant new enhancements that Visual Studio 2005 brings to Windows Mobile developers.

VSFileFinder is the most useful Visual Studio Addin I ever used. This tool was developed by Jonathan Payne. I can not live without it by now. It started me on the way to implement my first vs.net addin. It is similar to VSFileFinder but I would like to add much more functionality for it.

“VSFileFinder is a Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studo 2005 Add-In that helps you find files quickly in large projects. It can list files from all the project types that Visual Studio supports.

Once you have installed the add-in, you may like to set up a keyboard short cut for the “VSFileFinder.Connect.ShowVSFileFinder” command so you can use VSFileFinder without moving your hands from the keyboard.”

And hear is mine:

I have a lot of idea to build into this tool. The main reason why I started think about writting my own tool was that I have some idea which I haven’t seen in any tools developed yet. For example I implemented an incremental search which searchs only in the list of active document windows. Nobody missed this for years? I wonder. I’m going to add group of files also. This is useful if you would like to deal with a part of the system you are working on, and you don’t want to open all the files all the time when you need them. After you finished the job, you can turn back to an other group of files.

While I’m working on this addin, I will use VSFileFinder, because I like it. I propose it to every developer!

“DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer’s productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of the Visual Studio features.

Code Browser
File Browser
Framework Browser
Numbered Bookmarks
Surround With
Code Navigation
Solution Statistics
Support Help Options
DPack Keyboard Mapping Scheme
Delphi Keyboard Mapping Scheme “

This article was found on the homepage of Web Soft Technologies about the life cycle of an add-in.

Michael Gold’s tutorial on creating Visual Studio Add-Ins.