Monday, August 02, 2010

Walkthrough: Creating a Visual Studio Custom Start Page

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One of the coolest features of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to customize the new WPF based Start Page. We have released a project template for creating pages, using the Visual Studio 2010 default page as a starting point.
In the next two posts I’m going to walk through the process of creating a new page, testing the page using the VS Experimental Instance and finally uploading it to the Visual Studio Gallery where others can download your work. We will cover the following topics:
Part 1:
· Installing and using the Start Page project template
· Editing Start Page XAML
· Testing your custom Start Page in the VS experimental instance
· Making your custom Start Page the default
Part 2:
· Adding a code-behind to a Start Page
· Persisting user settings in a Start Page
· Sharing a Start Page on the Visual Studio Gallery
Installing and Using the Start Page Project template
1. First make sure to download and install the Visual Studio SDK
2. Download and install the Start Page project template.
Now you have installed the SDK and the Start Page template, the next few steps will go through loading the template and setting up project ready for editing.
1. Start Visual Studio and open the Custom Start Page Project template from the New Project Dialog.
The template will appear in the New Project Dialog (File->New Project) under ‘Installed Templates -> Visual C# -> Extensibility->‘Custom Start Page’
Note: this release of the template is only available for C#.
Read more: The Visual Studio Blog Part 1, Part 2