Reducing a Visual Studio Extension (VSIX) File Size

Introduction

I was recently updating my Azure DevOps Extension that I had published in the Visual Studio Marketplace. The last time I made an update to this extension was in 2019 but I already had everything in place including a DevOps pipeline, so I thought this should be easy. Well, almost. When I got to publishing the extension, I encountered an error. This article aims at unpacking the error and the solution applied to fix this.

Problem

I made my changes, all the unit tests passed and even the build pipeline generated a VSIX package — so far so good. However, when the release pipeline kicked in, it failed with the following error while trying to deploy the VSIX package to the Visual Studio Marketplace.

In case the screenshot above isn’t very clear, the text version is as follows:

error: Extension package is malformed/corrupted 0 [ 'error: Extension package is malformed/corrupted', '' ]

[error]tfx failed with error: Error: The process 'C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\tfx\0.7.11\x64\tfx.cmd' failed with exit code 4294967295

A quick search on the issue redirected me to this comment on a GitHub issue. Although it was for a VS Code extension, the underlying issue seemed like there was a file size limit in place when a VSIX was published to the Marketplace. This comment on the developer community forum also confirms a file size limit, although a slightly different size value.

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Buddha Community

Writing Visual Studio Extensions with Mads - Episode 1: Item Templates

Join Mads Kristensen from the Visual Studio team each week as he builds extensions for Visual Studio live!

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Syncfusion Visual Studio Extensions Support .NET 5.0 Preview 6

On June 25, 2020, Microsoft announced .NET 5.0 Preview 6. We already promised to provide support for.NET 5.0 for web and desktop platforms in this blog.

Now, we at Syncfusion happily announce .NET 5.0 Preview 6 support in the Syncfusion Visual Studio extensions for the following platforms:

• Blazor
• WPF
• WinForms

In this blog, I am going to explain which Syncfusion Visual Studio extensions have support for .NET 5.0 Preview 6.

Let’s get started!

Blazor Template Studio

The Blazor Template Studio extension for Visual Studio is used to create Blazor applications using prebuilt templates with Syncfusion Blazor components. This is now available with the .NET 5.0 Preview 6 support.

To use it, please select .NET 5.0 as the version in the configuration section, as shown in the following screenshot.

Also, you can use the Syncfusion Blazor project conversion and project migration Visual Studio Extension utilities in a .NET 5.0 application to convert or migrate to the Syncfusion version.

Visual Studio Code project template

Syncfusion Visual Studio Code extensions are now available with .NET 5.0 Preview 6 support.

To use them, select the .NET 5.0 option, as shown in the following screenshot.

For this as well, you can use the Syncfusion Blazor project conversion and project migration **Visual Studio Code extension **utilities in a .NET 5.0 application to convert or migrate to the Syncfusion version.

WPF and WinForms project templates

The WPF project template and WinForms project template extensions for Visual Studio allow you to create Syncfusion WPF and WinForms applications by using the prebuilt templates with .NET 5.0 and Syncfusion components.

You can use the Syncfusion Reference Manager to add the Syncfusion assemblies or NuGet packages as references in a .NET 5.0 WPF or WinForms application. Also, the Syncfusion Item Templates extension supports .NET 5.0 applications.

Conclusion

In summary, Syncfusion Visual Studio extensions now provide support to .NET 5.0 Preview 6 for the Blazor, WPF, and WinForms platforms.

Syncfusion has about 1,600 components and frameworks for WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET

(Web Forms, MVC, Core), UWP, Xamarin, Flutter, JavaScript, Angular, Blazor, Vue, and React. Use them to boost your application development speed.

If you aren’t a Syncfusion customer yet, you can try our 30-day free trial to check out our features. Also, try our samples from this GitHub location.

If you wish to send us feedback, please use the comments section below. If you would like to submit any questions, please feel free to contact us through our support forum, Direct-Trac, or feedback portal. We are always happy to assist you!

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Use Visual Studio in Presentation Mode

Have you ever seen a presentation using Visual Studio, but had a hard time seeing the too-small fonts in the editor, Solution Explorer and menu system? How about all the custom extensions and themes the presenter used, making it harder to figure out what exactly was going on? Perhaps you were the presenter? Here’s how Visual Studio Presentation Mode can help.

When doing any type of presentation or demo, it’s is crucial the audience fully understand what you’re presenting. If there are barriers to make that harder, then your presentation is not going to be as effective as it otherwise could have been. Customizations that differs from the default Visual Studio behaviors that your audience are already familiar with often cause confusion too.

Here are some typical barriers:

• Code is too small
• Text in tool windows and menus is too small
• Custom toolbar button layouts
• Extensions that change the behavior of Visual Studio
• Custom color themes

So, to remove as many barriers as possible, we need a fresh install of Visual Studio without any customizations. Yikes!

Or we can use Presentation Mode to open an instance of Visual Studio that looks exactly like a fresh install. Here’s what you get with a Presentation Mode instance:

1. Default settings, window layout, theme, and keyboard shortcuts
2. No extensions (other than machine-wide ones)
3. No settings synchronization with the normal Visual Studio instance

You can then customize any settings to configure Visual Studio for your demo or workspace. For example, change the font sizes to 18 for the Text Editor and 12 for the Environment or whatever value makes you happy. When you close Visual Studio these settings will be preserved for the next time you use Presentation Mode.

There are two ways of entering Presentation Mode:

The easy way

Install the Tweaks extension and open any solution, project, or file in Visual Studio. That ensures that the extension fully initializes. Now you can right-click the Visual Studio icon in the Windows task bar to open in Presentation Mode.

This makes it super easy to start a new Presentation Mode instance of Visual Studio.

Watch demo of Presentation Mode

The also somewhat pretty easy way

This is how the Tweaks extension mentioned above does it under the hood. You can do the same thing yourself if you don’t want to install the extension.

Open the Developer Command Prompt or Developer PowerShell and execute the following line:

devenv /RootSuffix _Demo_

You can swap the word Demo with whatever other word you want to create yet another isolated instance type. That might be useful for situations where you want different customizations depending on what type of project you’re working on.

For instance, you may want certain extensions and window layouts only when doing web development. This gives you that flexibility.

Watch demo of customized instances

Having the ability to isolate Visual Studio for various development scenarios and demo purposes is quite powerful. They are also easy to create and well supported – even in older version of Visual Studio. I’m curious to hear how this works for you, so let me know in the comments below.

#extensibility #visual studio #extensions #visual studio code

[Guest post] Learn C# with Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Unity

UPDATE: The book giveaway challenge is complete. We will be announcing winners on the Visual Studio blog within the next week. Thank you for your submissions!

Visual Studio is an amazing development tool. But Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac are more than just intuitive, state-of-the-art development environments. They’re also remarkably powerful learning and exploration tools, with features to help you create and understand your code. I love teaching and learning about C## with Visual Studio. That’s why my co-author, Jenny Greene, and I put Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac right at the center of our latest book, _Head First C# _(4th edition), published by O’Reilly Media. _Head First C# _incorporates Visual Studio directly in the learning. combining Visual Studio with the unique and innovative “brain-friendly” Head First approach to teaching helps us make learning C## easier and more fun for our readers.

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My Visual Studio Code Extensions (2020 Edition)

In this video, I’ll be showing you all of my Visual Studio extensions

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