The last thing that any author wants to hear is that a reader has encountered an issue with one of the code samples given in the book. Unfortunately that’s what happened this morning with the Professional Visual Studio 2010 book that has only recently been published. What we hadn’t anticipated was that Microsoft would completely change the process that you follow to customize the Start Page in Visual Studio 210. This is a walk through that is available in Chapter 3 of the book so I wanted to take this opportunity to provide an alternative which works with the RTM version of the product.
In previous previews of Visual Studio 2010 the process started with you taking a copy of the default start page (ie StartPage.xaml) from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\StartPages\en. Unfortunately this file no longer exists. Instead in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft has compiled the start page xaml into baml and embedded it into an assembly somewhere.
I figured, no problems, I’ll just start with the code sample that we already had working. Of course, there are missing and broken references. Even after fixing some of the references I noticed that the styling wasn’t the same as the default start page, so they must have added some polish to the start page since the code sample for the book was generated. I then decided to look further into where the start page had been placed. There were a number of dlls that I thought to be likely candidates for the start page:
In previous previews of Visual Studio 2010 the process started with you taking a copy of the default start page (ie StartPage.xaml) from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\StartPages\en. Unfortunately this file no longer exists. Instead in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft has compiled the start page xaml into baml and embedded it into an assembly somewhere.
I figured, no problems, I’ll just start with the code sample that we already had working. Of course, there are missing and broken references. Even after fixing some of the references I noticed that the styling wasn’t the same as the default start page, so they must have added some polish to the start page since the code sample for the book was generated. I then decided to look further into where the start page had been placed. There were a number of dlls that I thought to be likely candidates for the start page:
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.10.0
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.UI.Internal
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.StartPage
Turns out it’s not in any of these assemblies (although it does reference controls and components from these assemblies as we’ll see later on). It’s located in Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.UI.Internal.resources.dll. I used RedGate’s .NET Reflector (http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector) to trawl through these assemblies looking for start page references.
Read more: Professional Visual Studio
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