Visiting Microsoft Dev Tools Ecosystem Summit

If you didn’t hear from me and Martin during the last week, it’s because we were at the Microsoft Dev Tools Ecosystem Summit. If you have no clue what it means, here’s a translation – a partner conference for companies that build software that integrates with or extends Microsoft Visual Studio. Since Kentico is a Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP), we took this opportunity to learn more about VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility) technology and how we can use it for Kentico CMS.

The first part of the conference was public and if you’re interested in VSX, you can download the presentations here. The rest was, unfortunately, only for partners and under NDA, so we cannot tell you what you can expect in the next version of Visual Studio. Still, some general information can be found hin the InternetNews.com article  or in the Lou Franco's blog.

The whole conference was full of detailed technical information. The coolest thing, however, was to be here in Microsoft campus in Redmond, in the heart of Microsoft and to meet people who actually create Visual Studio. All of them were very friendly and willing to help (I suspect this is somewhat "by design" for all people living in the Washington state).









If you haven't been to Microsoft Campus in Redmond, all you need to know is that it's HUGE and FASCINATING. Microsoft has 50+ buildings like the one on the image on the right. Most employees have their own office with window into the park. They even have two soccer fields and their own large conference center.

Now you might want to know what it means for YOU, Kentico CMS user. Well, if you’re developing web sites with Kentico CMS, you probably know that editing HTML layouts, transformations and CSS stylesheets in a textbox may be hard if your design is too complex. You can certainly save these objects to the file system and open them in VS, but it’s not very straightforward. So we’re going to provide a direct integration with Visual Studio. Martin will disclose some more details in his blog later.